well... it depends which sort of hard trance you mean. HARD trance (eg trance generators and most of the italian stuff) or hard TRANCE (eg shokk, scot project, kramer - basically stuff with riffs). in HARD trance the bassline stays on one note and the tune doesnt really progress from the buh-wah-buh-wah stage, in hard TRANCE the whole point of the tune is the key change, this is the crux of the tune... this is where sampling basses (usually, but obviously not if you're andreas kramer) falls down, because its very hard to keep a sample sounding the same fatness at different pitches... not impossible but very hard. and tuning is a problem, because the tuning on the original sound will be imperfect, detuning is what makes stuff sound fat alot of the time, and when you pitch a sample of it up or down then the tuning suffers.

also i dont think im being blinkered... and i dont think creativity is limited by sampling - i love people like dj shadow, coldcut and hundreds of other hip hop/breaks producers who ONLY use samples - i just dont think that much HARD trance is very creative... i dont want to get into a bitchslap-fest here because i love and respect you as a dj and producer... but it isnt THAT hard to get a bassline sample to sit with a kick... little bit of compression, possibly lose a tiny bit of the lower end, move the sample back/forward a tiny bit... its half hour to an hours work... and the thing is, HARDtrance producers generally dont actually change the sound of the b-line that much... it still sounds like a hennes and cold or whatever (id say the best use i've heard of one is dj wag... listen very very closely to his ones on stuff like "on the run" and he's filtered it very cleverly and it even sounds fat when it drops!) but this is a rare case...

re: kramer, when thomas pogadl was over here i asked him (man i wouldnt shut up!) and he told me it came from vb-1... the bass isnt the same on all the tracks, maybe they use a combination of both?

i know it seems like im arguing with you but this sort of discussion can only open my eyes/ears/mind. the only thing i want is for my music to get better, and its f<>king superb to have this sort of opportunity to discuss these things with you. so please reply!