If you record bass directly into your audio interface and find yourself spending too much time trying to turn a plain DI signal into a finished bass tone, Box of Bass from Box of Rules is a plugin worth checking out.
And the first thing to know is that Box of Bass is completely free. According to Box of Rules, it is free for any use, including commercial productions, with no account or dongle required. It is available for macOS, Windows, and Linux, with VST3, AU, AAX, and standalone support.
I recently tested Box of Bass using a DI bass signal and was impressed by how much processing is packed into one plugin. Instead of starting with a single bass track and manually building a chain of amp simulators, cabinet plugins, distortion, EQ, compression, and room effects, Box of Bass gives you a complete layered bass rig inside one interface.
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Nine Bass Layers From One DI Signal
The core idea behind Box of Bass is simple: take one bass input and split it into nine different processing strips.
Those strips include a true sub, two clean cabinets, three driven microphone channels, and two room microphones. The clean cabinets represent 15-inch and 12-inch cabinets, while the driven microphone options include a 57, 421, and tweeter. The room section provides near and far room options, with the room feeds determined by the strips you select.
This gives you a lot of control over the character of the bass without having to build the entire setup yourself.
You can blend the original signal with the sub, clean cabinet sounds, distorted microphone layers, and room ambience. The individual strips can then be adjusted to create anything from a relatively clean bass sound to something much more aggressive.
Built-In Drive, Fuzz, EQ and Compression
Box of Bass also opens up its drive stage so you can shape the character of the processed bass rather than simply turning distortion on or off.
The plugin includes controls for saturation, drive, release, and sustain, along with different captured drive characters on the microphone strips. There are also per-strip headroom pads, room-feed selection, and master tone-shaping controls.
In my video, I demonstrate the different distortion and fuzz options and show how quickly the bass character can change simply by bringing different layers into the mix.
There is also a SIMPLE view for situations where you don’t want to deal with every individual strip. That makes Box of Bass useful for both detailed sound design and quick bass processing.
The Guitar Mode Is the Surprise
The feature that really caught my attention is GUITAR MODE.
Box of Bass can pitch the entire processing chain down an octave, allowing you to use a guitar to create a bass sound.
I demonstrate this toward the end of the video because it is a particularly useful feature for guitar players who do not have a bass available.
In my case, I was using Easy Bass for the DI demonstration because I had sold my physical basses. That made the guitar feature especially relevant: instead of needing a bass guitar to demonstrate the plugin, I could plug in a guitar and use Guitar Mode to create a bass-like sound.
Is Box of Bass Worth Downloading?
For a free plugin, Box of Bass offers an unusually complete approach to DI bass processing. It combines multiple bass layers, cabinets, microphone sounds, room processing, distortion, EQ, dynamics, and octave-down guitar processing into a single plugin.
Box of Bass is the successor to the earlier Bass Better-er beta, and Box of Rules says the final Bass Better-er release continues to work alongside Box of Bass so existing sessions are not broken.
If you regularly record DI bass, need a quick bass sound for songwriting, or want to experiment with turning guitar tracks into bass, Box of Bass is an interesting free addition to a music-production plugin collection.
Box of Bass is available from Box of Rules for macOS, Windows, and Linux.
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