What are the Best Plugins for UK Bass: Tops and Flops
Recent favorites including Current, Phase Plant, Amigo Sampler and more.
3,7 / 5,0 | 
Go down the bass and drums plugin rabbit hole with me as I try to find the best software for making UK bass.
The Best Plugins for UK Bass
I’m primarily an ambient musician and have been for more than three decades now. However, I also like music with a beat, preferably if that beat happens to be broken. Hardcore, jungle, breaks, UK garage – I like pretty much anything with a skippy beat and heavy bass. To keep things simple, let’s use the catchall term ‘UK bass’ from now on.
I was a breaks producer and DJ in the early 2000s, and recently I’ve found myself getting back into actually making dance music and not just listening to it. While I already had plenty of soft synths and other soundbed-focused apps for my ambient output, the rhythmic side was lacking. With that in mind, I thought I’d use this week’s edition of Tops and Flops to detail my journey back into bass.
Here are some of the plugins that I’ve been gravitating towards for the drums and bass part of the UK bass equation. What are your favorite plugins for bass and drums? Let me know in the comments.
The Best Plugins for UK Bass: Kilohearts Phase Plant
Kilohearts’ Phase Plant is a semi-modular soft synth capable of all sorts of incredible sounds. With its variety of sound sources (waveform, wavetable, samples and noise), it can do pretty much anything you need it to. It’s also got amazing FM, an absolute must for modern production. And, because it’s semi-modular, you can add in as many of any module as you need.
Although Phase Plant is a great all-rounder, I love it primarily for bass. And not just any bass, but massive, tearing, ripping Reese bass. When I got back into making bass music, I made a list of all of the kinds of sounds that I wanted to include (so I wouldn’t forget and end up trapped in some ambient K-hole like I usually do), and Reese was at the top of the list.
Thank you, Kevin Saunderson, for inventing the Reese bass, and thank you, Kilohearts, for making Phase Plant to deliver it unto my ears.
The Best Plugins for UK Bass: Minimal Audio Current
I may be the only dance music producer in the world who doesn’t own Serum. I’ve thought about getting it for sure, but when there’s Vital (which is free) and Current, it’s hard to justify the cost. (Remember, I have to get by on a writer’s salary.)
Minimal Audio’s Current may seem like a Serum clone but really, it’s a very different beast. It has its own sound, for one, and with its focus on effects and modulation, it’s amazing for sound design. I do like it for bass but also for pads, hoovers, leads, and the other kinds of sounds that you need to fill out a UK bass track.
The Best Plugins for UK Bass: PotenzaDSP Amigo Sampler
So that’s bass and noises covered, but what about beats? Let’s start the drum adventure with Amigo Sampler, a brilliant little plugin from PotenzaDSP. I’m old enough to remember jungle the first time around. It doesn’t matter how often I hear a chopped-up Amen break, though; it’s still exciting every time. Amigo Sampler makes that chopping easy to do, mapping slices to MIDI quickly and painlessly.
Amigo also sounds amazing. With its crunchy eight-bit resolution, it replicates the feel of old-school Amiga computers, which ‘90s producers used to make jungle and hardcore rave records. While I draw the line at trackers (I can’t do numbers, sorry), Amigo is the happy middle between classic and convenient.
If you like 90s-style chopping but want something free, Reason Studios recently updated its fantastic ReCycle and is now giving it away.
The Best Plugins for UK Bass: Excite Audio Bloom Drum Breaks
Excite Audio’s Bloom series of sequenced sample players is solid all around, but I’m particularly enamored of Bloom Drum Breaks. As the name suggests, it’s all about sampled breaks, which form the backbone of many genres in UK bass.
More than just a sample pack, however, it lets you edit and combine different royalty-free breaks into new patterns. It’s got a selection of effects that work really well with the material, and it sounds lovely overall – high fidelity but also characterful.
The best thing about Bloom Drum Breaks (and all the Bloom instruments, really) is how quickly you’re able to get something useful out of it. Whether you’re after tops for a rhythm track or a full-on break to take the main stage, Bloom Drum Breaks can do it – and in literally seconds.
The Best Plugins for UK Bass: Inphonik RX1200
A big part of classic ‘90s breaks records is the sound. Built around samples, they acquired a warm and lo-fi character thanks to all the hardware processing and down-sampling. Amigo Sampler (above) is one way to get that. Another is with RX 1200, an emulation of the E-mu SP-1200 by Inphonik.
I love Inphonik’s RX950, which models the AD/DA converter used in the Akai S950, so when I heard that the company did an SP-1200 emulation, I had to get it. There’s no sequencer, just sample processing, so you need to use it in conjunction with your DAW sequencer, but the incredible sound more than makes up for that. It nails it, with 12-bit resolution, a 26.041kHz sample rate and SSM2044 lowpass filter emulation.
I like it for drum processing, of course, but it also works amazingly well on bass. Drop a distorted 808 in there and boom: instant vibes.
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