Bass Better-er Is Out, Free in Beta
The bass tone on the Box of Rules records did not come from a preset. It came from a chain I built and rebuilt chasing one thing: a bass that sits in a loud mix without being asked twice. Bass Better-er is that chain, boxed up so you can drop it on a DI and start there instead of from nothing.
What is in the box
A real bass record is never one signal. It is a foundation you feel, a body you hear, dirt that bites, and the room around all of it, balanced live. Bass Better-er splits one DI into those parallel layers. Each owns its slice of the spectrum and is voiced from a real studio capture, then they blend back into a single, bigger instrument. The lows stay centred and mono, so it holds together on a phone and opens up on a big system.
One bass DI, rebuilt into a whole session.
Free in beta, Premium next
The fastest way to make it good is to put it on other people's basses and find out where it falls over. So the full plugin is free while it is in beta. It runs as VST3, AU and standalone across macOS, Windows and Linux, and every build is published on GitHub. A Premium version is on the way; beta feedback shapes what goes in it. If it earns a place on your tracks in the meantime, there is a tip jar.
How to get it
Head to the plugin page. The download button there always points at the newest release, pulled live from the repo, so there is never a stale link to chase. Found a bug or have a request? Open an issue.
The engineering story
Want how it was actually built — capturing the chain through a Neve 8108, profiling every channel on the desk with pink noise, and the deconvolve‑distort‑reconvolve DSP behind each layer? I wrote the full engineering story on the Deviant Ops blog: Where 15 Years of Bass Meets 15 Years of Code.