This is a pretty recent addition to our studio and also a pretty specialized item. A Bass Drum synth which, obviously, is only designed to produce all kinds of sounds that go Boem!! It’s more or less derived from the 909 style kick drum, but has far more options which definitely expand its sonic capabilities way beyond typical 909 usage. If you’re into electronic music and in search of a decent kick drum, you should take a long and hard look at this thing. It’s not cheap, but, given the prices asked for decent drum machines, not that bad value for the money.  Okay, you could download more 909,808 and whatnot samples from the internet till you fill your hard drive up 5 times over, but it’s just not the same. On the Mbase, you can get a kick-ass bass drum with 2 fingers up your nose. Getting it ‘just right’ for your song only takes a few moments longer… and that’s a huge difference to any sample based approach. In short, it’s easy to get good results.

The works?

You should be able to get a lot out of the Mbase without a look at the manual. Selecting a parameter to edit is as simple as pushing up/down and seeing where the led is lit. The right side of the controls are pretty simple and self-explanatory and consist of the main 8! parameters used to shape your sound. Playing around with those settings, you quickly notice the wide range of possibilities you get from these. But unlike many synths with lot’s of control, they say what they do on the tin, want more attack, dial in more attack, want more click sound, dial in more .. they don’t really come in your way, making editing a breeze.  So far, live is simple and you’ll get decent results fast.

But it has some more tricks up it’s sleeve. This is where the left hand controls come in play. On the basic level there are the midi settings (channel, pitch, split) which enable you to define how it should react to incoming midi note signals (you can make it behave as a little bass synth if you want it to) and then some LFO settings. The LFO can add some interesting modulation to the kick for more experimental use. It’s a nice addition, but that’s about it.

And then we have the audio input tracking. It’s designed to accept audio input or CV input and pump out a bass drum according the threshold. There are only a handful of controls, but It works very well and shouldn’t take more as 10 minutes to set up to your liking. As with all these things it can be a bit tricky to get a good trigger point and if you feed it a complex signal you’d better EQ it first a bit to remove unwanted triggers. It might be of less use in the studio (you can do the exact same thing with almost any DAW and get tons more control over the process) but it’s certainly opens the unit up to drummers who want to spice up their kick drum beyond what’s physically possible. Or people, like me, who like the more experimental angle to this feature.

And yes, on top of it all there’s still MIDI. As expected everything is addressable through control changes so it’s remotely controllable if you’d wish. It also sends out those controllers, so automation should be a breeze. Jomox used the same midi cc’s as on my Jomox xBase so a simple out to in connection and I had a remote controller for the mbase. nice.

it’s not all good

As you can read, there are a lot of good stuff to say about this machine. But there are still some things which I’d like to see differently. First of all, the ‘play’ button. Pressing it plays the sound you’re editing. So far no problem, but the knob produces a loud mechanical ‘click’ sound, which makes it very hard to judge the attack of your kick drum sound at normal studio monitoring levels. Not really a ‘problem’ if you trigger it by midi, but still.. it’s annoying.

The next thing we noticed kept us pondering an hour or so trying to troubleshoot the situation. In our studio every port outputs a midi clock as mostly everything needs a sync signal anyway.  When the Mbase 01 receives a midi clock (useful to sync the LFO) and midi notes only the first note played and all consequent notes were muted. When we restarted the sequencer, first note plays, everything else after that.. nope. It received sync all right, but since it wouldn’t really play any notes it was pretty useless. Stopping the sync signal to the Mbase would return behaviour to normal. Baffled by this, we spend a while figuring out what happened. Turns out enabling MTC (midi time code) solved the issue resulting in the Mbase having sync and playing every note. I still don’t know why this happens, nor is it indicated in the manual this sync configuration is needed. It’s weird as I have many synced synths and sequencers and none of them require MTC, normal midi clock is sufficient.

conclusion

There is very little wrong with the Mbase. Provided your music needs an electric bassdrum kind of sound, there is little reason not to consider it. Getting a good kick drum sound can be a very difficult and time consuming thing and the Mbase simply makes it a breeze. so.. it’s worth a look.