The $29 BassBoy MIDI Bass Synthesizer

The MikroElektronika BassBoy is a $29 minimal monophonic digital MIDI controlled bass synthesizer.

It’s designed to be the heart of a DIY project, generating monophonic bass lines from MIDI input.

The BassBoy offers full MIDI control over filter pre-gain, filter cutoff, resonance, envelope modulation, decay, accent, gain and master volume.

Here’s an audio preview of BassBoy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXthAoUhPMI

via alexfox101:

The unit consists of oscillator which generates SAW & SQUARE WAVE using 16-bit band-limited wavetables, thus making the number of harmonics limited. After that, the signal itself goes through a simple implementation of MOOG filter, whose frequency range is chosen by MIDI commands and which is affected by the level of the envelope. The filtered signal then comes to the controlled amplifier, which creates the signal shape, and in the end through DAC (WM8762) and pre-amp circuit goes to the audio jack 6.35mm.<

Right channel – drums and other things, left channel – BassBoys…

Midi: Children – Robert Miles (rearranged)

The BassBoy is $29 at the Analog Digital World site.

8 thoughts on “The $29 BassBoy MIDI Bass Synthesizer

  1. Looks/sounds pretty cool, especially for the price! From the image it looks like a MIDI IN jack would need to be attached via a break-out (easy enough). I wonder if re-routing Note-On velocity to CC7 would create a reasonable “velocity sensing” effect? Does “ACCENT” mean attack time? Or is that something else?

  2. Don’t let moog see this , they will do what Apple does and take them to court.
    It looks great and sounds great . A cheap and nasty synthesiser that will help make loads of great new fucked up dance tracks.
    If you think of Rolands new tedious monster and then this tiny mono thing, the mono thing wins hands down.

  3. @stub:
    velocity 0 = note off, velocity 1 – 100 = normal note, velocity 101 – 127 = note with accent.
    ACCENT controls intensity of the accent on notes with accent. When resonance is minimum value, envelope which comes to filter is logarithmic, but when resonance is at maximum value, envelope is
    softened logarithmic and sounds like a little ducky effect. In same time, note with accent sounds louder than normal note…

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