BassForge
Guitar to Bass.
In Real Time.
A real-time octave-down bass engine, a harmonic exciter that carries low end through any speaker, and a clean-room fuzz — in a single AUv3 plugin for iPhone and iPad. Play guitar. Hear bass.
About
One guitar input.
A full bass voice.
BassForge regenerates an octave-down bass voice from your guitar the instant you play — an analog-style frequency divider, not a time-stretcher. It locks to your note with near-zero latency, never smears, and stays rock-solid on fast lines and sustained notes alike. Monophonic and tuned for the low end, with voicings from a pure, deep sub to a fuller, midrange-forward bass.
Signal Chain
Every stage is intentional.
INPUT COMP
FET-Style Conditioning
A FET-style gain stage at the front of the chain. Levels your playing so the octave engine tracks cleanly whether you're picking lightly or digging in hard — with an enable switch and a drive control.
OCTAVE ENGINE
Real-Time Octave Divider
An analog-style sub-octave divider in the lineage of the classic OC-2 and Dig Deep pedals — not a frequency-domain pitch shifter. It follows your note as you play it, with effectively zero added latency. Two voicings: DEEP, a pure octave-down sub, and BODY, which blends the played note back in for more midrange presence.
FOCUS
Lowest-Note Tracking
Turn on FOCUS and the engine biases its tracking to the lowest note you're playing — so the octave locks to the root even when a higher note rings on top. Cheap, low-latency, and tied to your tuning.
TUNING
Tuning-Aware Presets
Pick your tuning — Standard, E♭, D Standard, or Drop D / C# / C / B — and BassForge seeds its filter range and tightens its low-note tracking to match. Lower tunings track the low string better automatically.
HARMONIC
Harmonics for Small Speakers
Phone and tablet speakers can't physically move 40 Hz — but they can reproduce its harmonics. The HARMONIC exciter adds 2nd- and 3rd-harmonic content above the fundamental so the bass registers on any speaker, even when the fundamental itself is below what the driver can reproduce. AMOUNT and VOICE controls dial the character.
FUZZ
Clean-Room Harmonic Fuzz
A clean-room fuzz voicing in the big-muff tradition — SUSTAIN, TONE, and MIX — for grit and thickness. Run it before the octave to fatten the signal feeding the divider, or after it to saturate the bass directly, with a single PRE switch.
VOICING EQ
Bass Shaping
A fixed 35 Hz high-pass kills sub-rumble, then three voicing bands shape the output: BODY at 100 Hz, a MUD bell at 300 Hz, and a TONE tilt that moves the sub from deep to present. Dialed in for sub-bass, not octave-down guitar.
OUTPUT COMP
Sub-Safe Compressor
A compressor voiced specifically for sub-bass — a sidechain high-pass keeps the low fundamental from driving its own gain reduction, and a slow attack follows the note envelope so it controls level without distorting the bottom. THRESHOLD, RATIO, MAKEUP, and a live gain-reduction meter.
GATE
Input & Output Gating
An input GATE sets how soft a note can be and still trigger the octave, so quiet notes pass and noise doesn't. An optional output noise gate, keyed to your clean input, silences the tail between notes for a tight, clean low end.
SPECTRUM
Live FFT Display
A 2048-point real-time spectrum view of your input so you can see exactly what BassForge is working with, moment to moment.
TARGET RANGE
Draggable Filter Handles
Drag the HPF and LPF triangle handles directly on the spectrum to set the band BassForge listens to — snapping to the nearest semitone — without a separate controls panel. A WIDE switch opens the range fully.
IN / BYPASS
Hard Bypass Switch
A slide switch in the header takes BassForge completely out of the signal path — for A/B comparisons or silencing the bass voice mid-session.
DRY THRU
Blend In Your Dry Guitar
Activate DRY THRU and your original dry guitar is blended back in with the processed bass, balanced against it with the DRY control — so you can run guitar and bass together out of a single output without a second pass.
Bass and guitar.
Together.
Activate DRY THRU and your original dry guitar is blended back in with the processed bass, balanced against it with the DRY control — so you can run guitar and bass together out of a single output without a second pass.
Availability
iPhone and iPad.
iOS / iPadOS
TBD
- AUv3 plugin
- LoopyPro
- AUM
- GarageBand
- Cubasis
- Any AUv3 host
Get it now