XY Bass

Bass problems are rarely one knob. A sub that vanishes on a phone. A kick that is loud without being felt. Weight that turns to mud as soon as the track fills up.

XY Bass puts those outcomes on one pad. Left to right runs from sub — depth you feel — to translate — the harmonics that make the same note audible on a laptop, a phone or a rig that starts at 40 Hz. Bottom to top runs from clean to dirty: how much character the plug-in is allowed to add on the way. You pick the result; it works out the chain.

What the pad is driving

It tracks the fundamental, how strong it is, how tonal or percussive the material is and how correlated the two channels are, then moves the crossover and the generators to fit. An 808 and a kick drum do not get the same treatment from the same pad position.

• Sub reinforcement and reconstruction. Where the fundamental is there, it is reinforced. Where it is missing, an oscillator locked to the tracked pitch puts it back.
• Harmonic translation. Generated harmonics let a 40 Hz note read as bass on a speaker that cannot reproduce 40 Hz. That is what the right-hand side of the pad is for.
• Low-end dynamics that hold the bottom still, with the attack protected so hits keep their front edge.
• Mud and fizz control, acting only when the material asks for it.

Judging it rather than guessing

Auto Gain keeps the level steady as you move, so one pad position can be compared with another. Delta plays only what XY Bass is adding — the fastest way to tell a reinforced fundamental from a rebuilt one. The readout above the pad shows the note being tracked.

Presets

13 of them: Balanced Bass, Clean Weight, Club Sub, Phone Translation, 808 Bigger, Kick Body, Techno Hammer, Bass Growl, Small Speaker, Gentle Mixbus, Dirty Rumble, Heavy But Clean and Translate Hard.

Where it fits

On the bass itself, to make one part carry depth and translation at once. On a kick, when the body is there but the weight is not. On a drum bus, with Mix blending rather than replacing. At the gentle end of the pad on a mix bus, where the job is keeping the bottom steady.

It is at its most precise on a single low source — a bass, an 808, a kick — because that is where the readout above the pad means something and the sub it builds is locked to a note it has identified. On a full mix it still does real work: Club Sub adds about 15 dB in the 40 to 60 Hz band and leaves everything above 90 Hz alone, and Gentle Mixbus is the same move about 10 dB quieter. Judge that by listening to the bottom, not by a null test — the change is confined to one narrow band, so a broadband comparison makes it look like nothing is happening.

Tested before it ships

pluginval at strictness 10 passes on Windows, macOS and Linux, and auval passes for the Audio Unit. Mix 0 % is bit-for-bit the input. Output is bit-identical from 1 to 8192 samples per block and a repeated render matches the first. Sample rates from 22.05 kHz to 768 kHz run stable. NaN or infinity from a plug-in upstream is contained and the engine recovers; silence in is exact silence out. Latency is 459 samples at 48 kHz, reported honestly to the host.