Guitarist Mark M Thompson takes a look at two of UJAM’s recent virtual instruments: DEEP (a drummer) and DANDY (a bassist), both players inspired by vintage soul and R&B with a smattering of old school funk. Over to Mark:

I find the development of virtual instrumentalists an interesting one: On one hand, programmers and producers who aren’t necessarily musicians themselves now have “players” that can follow your basic chord sequences and provide “live” arrangements and accompaniment parts. On the other, the AI isn’t there yet to genuinely make up a brand new part to go with your song from scratch, based on a few piano or guitar chords. So everyone using the same virtual player plugins end up using the same included patterns.

Luckily, most of the time you can drag and drop the plugin’s provided MIDI phrases or grooves into your DAW for editing and customisation (as is the case here with UJAM’s instruments), so you don’t end up with the same grooves and patterns in your tunes as every other producer. With both DEEP and DANDY, the ability to tweak is handed to you and very much encouraged from the get-go. This is good as whilst they both feature a plethora of styles, the styles themselves are somewhat limited in groove or phrase variation – just a few verses, a handful of fills, choruses and a few breakdown/specials. The great thing with these two is that they share the same song DNA and are designed to be used in conjunction with the other. You don’t have to, of course, but when it’s obvious how much time and effort has gone into creating two plugins that work in sympatico this well, making sure they’re on the same page musically gives very rewarding results.

Quality Sounds

The freely resizable GUIs are clear and concise, and once you get to grips with one you’ll have an immediate grasp of the other or any other UJAM product. Sound quality wise, they’re both great. The sample library for DEEP is only 3.29GB which is surprising for how many different kit pieces are on offer, although I suspect that many of them are the same samples being effected within the plugin. DANDY is larger at 6.22GB, which still seems slight considering the amount of customisation and control you have over the sound. Whilst the melodic phrases in DANDY can be performed in any key, you are limited to major or minor scales. If, for instance, you have a song in G major, you cannot change the D major to a minor unless you automate the song key.

In the video I mention how the styles, though shared between DEEP and DANDY, are on different octaves. This must be a consequence of the placement of the phrases being consistent between Virtual Drummers and between Virtual Bassists but not between Drummers and Bassists because of the melodic nature of the bass players. Including a suitable track transpose using Real Time MIDI properties or your DAW’s equivalent fixes this.

At present there is a UI resize bug when dealing with multiple windows where the resize doesn’t persist on opening and closing windows. Whether or not this bothers you does of course depend on how big your screen is and whether or not you prefer to reduce the size of the UI.

Great For Songwriters

On the whole, I think they’re worthy additions as standalone sample library instruments let alone fully featured virtual players, and will no doubt find themselves being used for many a song writing session or full production. I’d like to see MIDI expansion packs in the future, these would be a great way to extend the capabilities of these instruments.

All UJAM virtual instruments are available to demo for 30 days, and are completely void of any restrictions during that period which is utterly brilliant. Go and try them out!