All For Strings 2 String Bass

Getting Started With All For Strings 2 String Bass

I've been using Spitfire's All For Strings series for a few years now, and the 2 String Bass patch is one of those instruments that looks simple on paper but has a few quirks you'll only learn the hard way. This library is built around solo double bass samples with an unusually intimate, up-close mic perspective. That means every detail of the playing technique is visible, which is either your best friend or your worst problem depending on how you sequence it. The library contains legato transitions, portamento slides, spiccato, col legno, and a few more extended techniques. What makes it different from a standard Kontakt bass library is the mic positioning and the amount of noise captured. You hear the fingerboard creaks, the bow hairs grazing strings, the breathy releases. That intimacy is the selling point. It's also the source of most headaches. If you're trying to build a section sound by layering six or eight instances of the 2 String Bass, you're going to have a bad time. The samples are too dry and too close-mic'd. They'll clash phase-wise and sound thin rather than thick. I learned this after spending two weeks trying to make a "bass section" out of it before I finally accepted it was never meant for that role.

The sweet spot for this library is single-track solo writing. Or at most two voices contrapuntally. When used correctly, it can replace a real double bass player in film mixing situations where you need extreme dynamic control and fast turnaround. It can't replace a live player who can respond to conductor gestures, but for locked-to-picture scoring where you're writing to stems, it works well.

Installation And Setup

Download the library from the Spitfire Audio app. The 2 String Bass is not always sold separately — it ships as part of the All For Strings bundle, though there have been standalone promotions over the years. Make sure you're running at least version 1.1.4 of the Spitfire Librarian, because early versions had a bug where the legato maps wouldn't load correctly on certain machines with large sample caches. Load it into Kontakt 5.7 or later. I prefer using the standalone version of Kontakt rather than an instrument slot inside a DAW. It gives you more headroom for heavy polyphony and avoids the DAW's audio buffer issues when loading large sample sets. The library ships with its own Kontakt interface, so you don't need to build a custom map unless you want to. Here's something the manual doesn't emphasize enough: the library uses round-robin sampling across multiple mic positions. If you're getting inconsistent timbral results between hits on the same note, check your disk streaming settings in Kontakt. Set cache size to at least 4GB and make sure your samples are on an SSD. Loading from a spinning drive will cause mic position dropouts mid-note because the sample data can't keep up.

How The Legato System Actually Works

The legato engine in All For Strings is one of the more honest implementations I've encountered. Instead of triggering random loops or artificial crossfades, each legato transition is a pre-recorded slide from one pitch to the next. The library maps hundreds of these transitions across different intervals and bowing positions. When you play smoothly on a MIDI keyboard, it matches the interval and direction and triggers the corresponding transition sample. The catch is that the legato system requires sustained key pressure and overlapping note triggers. If you're playing legato with a keyboard that has stiff aftertouch or you're typing notes in with a mouse, the transitions will fail silently and you'll hear separate attacked notes instead of smooth slides. I spent an afternoon debugging what I thought was a broken library before realizing my MIDI controller's key pressure response was set too low. Cranking the aftertouch sensitivity fixed it immediately. There's also a range limit to the legato engine. Transitions work reliably up to about a minor tenth. Beyond that, the library falls back to a generic sliding sample or just plays the target note with no transition at all. This isn't a defect — it's the reality of recording real legato transitions across every possible interval. A major thirteenth slide is an extremely difficult technique even for professional bassists, and they simply couldn't record enough variation to map it convincingly.

Mic Positions And Mixing Realities

The library offers three mic positions: close, medium, and ambient. The close mic is where most of the character lives. It's uncomfortably close — you can hear the rosin dust falling off the bow. The medium position is more usable for general mixing but still retains a lot of surface noise. The ambient mic adds room but in a small studio space, not an actual concert hall. It won't give you natural reverb tail depth. A practical trick I use: route the close and medium mics to separate tracks in your DAW and blend them rather than relying on the internal mixer. This gives you independent EQ control on each position. The close mic benefits from a high-pass filter around 35Hz to remove subsonic rumble that accumulates during long Sustains and Legato passages. The medium mic often needs a gentle cut around 800Hz if you're placing it alongside other instruments in a dense mix — that frequency area gets muddy fast. Don't add reverb to the 2 String Bass track itself. Add it on a send from a bus. The samples are already intimately recorded and any convolution reverb you layer on top will fight against the natural bleed already present in the recordings. You'll get phase problems that sound like the bass is moving in and out of focus as you automate volume.

Spiccato And Short Articulations

The spiccato samples are genuinely useful. They're recorded with natural bow bounces rather than forced staccato attacks, which means the articulation feels organic even at fast tempos. The library maps spiccato across the full range of the instrument, and the transitions between notes are clean enough that you can sequence rapid passages without obvious repetition artifacts. Col legno is included and sounds realistic, but it has a very limited dynamic range. The samples are essentially at one velocity layer. If you trigger col legno at mezzo-piano it still sounds like mezzo-forte because there's no lighter velocity option. This is a known limitation of the library. For quiet col legno passages, you'll need to automate volume down after triggering, or sidechain it with an EQ cut in the presence range so it doesn't dominate the mix. One edge case I ran into recently: I was scoring a scene that required repeated pizzicato notes in the low register while a cello was playing harmonics an octave above. The 2 String Bass pizzicato samples contain a subtle sympathetic resonance from the c string vibrating against the body. At first it sounded like a flaw — a slight buzz on certain notes. But when I matched the pitch to the cello harmonic, the resonance actually reinforced the harmonic beautifully. What initially read as sample imperfection became a useful musical accident. I kept it and built the arrangement around it.

Common Pitfalls

The most frequent mistake people make with this library is ignoring the natural breathing pauses in the recorded performances. Every phrase has micro-pauses where the player resets bow position or breathes. If you quantize your MIDI too aggressively, those pauses disappear and the phrasing sounds mechanical. Leave at least some timing variance. Ghost notes and almost-subtle timing offsets make the library sound noticeably more human. Another pitfall is velocity automation. The library responds to MIDI velocity, but the response curve is not linear. A velocity of 64 doesn't produce half the volume of 127 — it produces roughly three-quarters. The dynamic range is compressed compared to real playing. If you want extreme soft passages, you need to drop velocity to below 40 and then automate volume upward slightly to compensate. The samples at very low velocities can sound choked because the bow isn't engaging the string fully in the recording. String cross-ratios matter more here than in most libraries. If you're voicing chords across multiple octaves, be aware that the outer strings (G and E) have distinctly different timbres from the inner strings (D and A). A chord that spreads too widely across the string set can sound unbalanced because each string carries a different weight and color. I usually keep bass lines within a two-string span to maintain consistency.

What This Library Cannot Do

It cannot do fast repeated notes at high velocity without sounding artificial. The sample design doesn't support true tremolo or rapid alternation between the same pitch. You'll get obvious looping artifacts after about four to six repetitions. For tremolo effects, use the sustain samples with vibrato automation instead, or layer in a different library specifically designed for tremolo. It cannot convincingly play in the extreme upper register above high C on the E string. The samples top out around that point, and anything above is either bent or non-existent. If your composition requires extended techniques like sul ponticello or extreme harmonics across the full range, this library won't cover it. You'd need a more specialized solo bass library for that. The libray also struggles with extremely slow bows at very soft dynamics. The close mic captures the initial bow engagement noise — the scratch of hair on string before tone establishes. At slow tempos and low volumes, that engagement noise becomes disproportionately loud relative to the sustained tone. It sounds like the note is struggling to start rather than beginning cleanly. I work around this by triggering slightly louder and riding the volume down, or by comping takes where the engagement noise falls naturally within the surrounding context.

Final Practical Notes

The All For Strings 2 String Bass library is not a substitute for hiring a bassist. It's also not a section player. It's a solo instrument library with exceptionally detailed sampling that rewards careful writing and punishes lazy sequencing. If you treat it like a real instrument — respecting phrasing, dynamics, and the physical limitations of what was recorded — it delivers results that are genuinely competitive with live performance in the right context. The download and installation process through the Spitfire Audio app is straightforward. The library occupies roughly 8GB of disk space. It runs comfortably on a machine with 16GB of RAM, though 32GB gives you more breathing room for complex projects with multiple instances. The official documentation is adequate but sparse on the technical details I covered above — most of what I've written here comes from actual usage over multiple production cycles. If you're new to virtual instruments and this is your first encounter with a close-mic'd solo bass sample library, start with simple melodic lines before attempting anything harmonically dense. The library reveals its limitations quickly under pressure, and it's better to discover those limits on a single note than during a deadline mix session.