i feel similarly.. there is a section with nothing but pure double bass and some guitarish sounding synth playing root notes. more harmonic development could really benefit this track; it's easy to be a bassist who only plays roots but that gets stale pretty quick. just accentuating the fifth and m/M9s is an easy way to breathe some harmonic life into a piece. i think the drums need some phattening up too -- you can do that through eq and some light reverb/stereo width. also a melody is entirely absent throughout. dunno if that was intentional or not though. as far as working with acoustic samples goes, the first step to making them sound better is humanization. edit the velocities so consecutive note/drum hits are never identical, offset the timings of notes by a couple ticks, and mess around with note lengths. it helps to put yourself in the shoes of someone playing the part.