Sonic LAB: MBase11 Analog Bass Drum Synthesizer

I Get A Kick Out Of You
You could say that the MBase11 is merely a single voice synth with no filter and a simple decay only envelope generator, but that would be grossly over-simplifying what it can do. The attack portion of the sound gets a lot of care and attention with several noise sources that can be blended for changing the character of the impact portion of the sound, Pulse, Noise and MetNze (Metal Noize) all can be combined to create numerous flavours of whack, the Gate also helps to lengthen or shorten the attack portion. For the meat/pitched part of the sound, there's a single wave - sine as far as I can tell, which can be harmonically enriched with the Harmonics parameter - at extreme settings giving the kick a distorted 909 full-on quality.

The Tune and Pitch parameters take care of the amount of pitch envelope [tune] and tuning [pitch] of the kick, with compression and EQ providing an emphasis for the decay portion and a large scoop of mid respectively.

Kick Out the Jams
Once you've set the desired MIDI channel, you can choose to set the kick to respond to either note 36 (C1) or play pitched over three octaves with the Split Mode, useful for playing the pitch of the kick to a track, or with long decay sounds, for simple b-line tones. An external X Trig input lets you run this from a live source, such as a drum pad, piezo electric pickup or a suitably peaky mic source. Indeed, this is a cute little trick used by many acoustic drummers who feed in their kick drum or trigger to beef up the sound of their own live kits - this feature was also there in the MBase01.

Once you have the sound of your dreams, and there are so many variations, they can be stored in the 110 user memories and recalled via MIDI program changes if you need them. Note - MIDI Ch, Split Mode, Pitch Mode are not stored with a patch unfortunately.

This ain't the lowest priced unit in the world when you consider that it only does the Kick drum, but with such a massive emphasis on this sound in most modern music, it would make sense to at least try this out.

JoMoX MBase11 $369/€239 Available now.

• Jomox.com

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