1   What BassMuse is

BassMuse is a MIDI-effect plugin. It reads MIDI (chords) and writes MIDI (a bass line). It makes no sound of its own — its output feeds a bass instrument of your choice. In every host the job is the same:

chords  →  BassMuse  →  a bass instrument

You give BassMuse a chord progression — typed into its built-in grid, or played live into its MIDI input — pick a bassist style, and it generates a musical bass line that stays locked to the host tempo and transport.

Two ways to drive it

• Song mode — build a full arrangement inside BassMuse (sections, meters, chords per bar) and it plays that arrangement.
• Follow mode — BassMuse listens to chords arriving at its MIDI input in real time and plays along with whatever you feed it.

What's in the box

• 16 built-in bassist styles, each with its own feel.
• A section-based arranger with a sub-bar chord grid and a circle-of-fifths chord picker.
• Live chord-follow, MIDI kick-lock, and drag-out MIDI export.
• Plain-text, shareable style / song / bundle files.

2   Installing

Windows

1. Run BassMuse-1.6.0-Setup.exe.
2. It installs the VST3 to C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3\BassMuse.vst3 — the folder every DAW scans.
3. Accept the license agreement, then continue.
4. Launch your DAW and rescan plug-ins if it doesn't appear automatically.

macOS

1. Open BassMuse-1.6.0.pkg, accept the license agreement, and follow the installer.
2. It installs both formats system-wide:
   • VST3 → /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3/BassMuse.vst3
   • Audio Unit → /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components/BassMuse.component
3. Logic Pro and Luna use the AU; most other Mac DAWs can use either.

Formats by DAW

3   Quick start (3 steps)

The fastest way to hear BassMuse, using Song mode:

1. Insert BassMuse before a bass instrument. Put BassMuse and a bass synth in the same signal path so BassMuse's MIDI reaches the synth. (Exactly how depends on your DAW — see §12. In Logic: BassMuse in the track's MIDI FX slot. In Reaper: BassMuse then the synth in one FX chain.)
2. Type a progression. In BassMuse's Arrangement grid, click a chord cell and enter chords (e.g. C, Am, F, G) — or use the chord selector (§7).
3. Pick a style and press Play. Choose a style from the dropdown, set Source = Song (grid), and start the host transport. BassMuse plays the bass line through your synth, in time.

To play along live instead

Set Source = Follow MIDI and send chords into BassMuse's MIDI input (from a MIDI clip, a keyboard, or your DAW's chord track). BassMuse plays bass under whatever chords it hears.

4   The interface at a glance

The editor is one window, top to bottom:

Top row — global controls

Selected Section — per-section settings

Arrangement — the chord grid

• Section bands across the top — click one to select it.
• Chord cells below — click a cell and type a chord, or open the chord selector.
• Grid sets tick size: 1/4, 1/8, or 1/16 — so you can place more than one chord per bar.
• + Section / − Section, + Bar / − Bar, and zoom + / − shape the arrangement.
• A playhead sweeps the grid during playback and auto-scrolls.

Styles & export

• Import Style / Export Style — share .bmstyle files (§11).
• Drag-MIDI strip — press and drag to drop the arrangement as a .mid (§10).

5   Source modes

The Source dropdown decides where BassMuse gets its chords.

Song (grid)

Plays the arrangement you built in the grid — every section, its meter, style, feel and chords, in order, locked to the transport. This is the main mode for writing a bass part into a song.

Follow MIDI

Ignores the grid and plays under chords arriving at BassMuse's MIDI input in real time. Hold a chord on a keyboard or feed a MIDI clip / chord track and BassMuse follows it, using the first section's style and feel. The arrangement grid hides in this mode to keep the window compact.

Demo progression

A built-in looping progression so you can audition a style instantly without building anything. Great for comparing styles.

6   Building a song

Sections

A song is a list of sections. Each section has its own time signature, bassist style, feel, and bars — so a 4/4 Motown verse can be followed by a 3/4 prog bridge in a different style. Use + Section / − Section to add and remove them, and click a section band to select and edit it. A song always keeps at least one section, so − Section won't remove the last one (it flashes to say so). To wipe everything and start over, use File → Clear Song.

Quick song builder

File → Build arrangement… scaffolds a whole multi-section song in one step. Type a structure as Name:Bars tokens —

Verse:8 Prechorus:4 Chorus:8 Turn:4 Verse:8 Chorus:8

— or click a template (Pop, Verse/Chorus, AABA, 12-bar blues). BassMuse creates all the named sections with those bar counts; new sections inherit the currently-selected section's meter, style and feel, and repeated names are auto-numbered (Verse 1, Verse 2). Choose Append to add to the current song, or Replace to clear it first — and Save current song… backs up the existing arrangement before you replace it.

Copy, paste & insert sections

Right-click a section band for the full set of actions:

• Insert Section Before / After — drop a new section at that exact spot, not just at the end.
• Duplicate Section — copy the section (chords, meter, style, feel) in place, named “… copy”.
• Copy / Cut, then Paste Before / After — move or repeat a section anywhere in the song (e.g. copy a chorus and paste it later).
• Copy Chords / Paste Chords — copy just this section's chord progression and drop it into another section, without changing the target's style, feel or meter (unlike Copy Section, which carries everything).
• Delete Section.

Keyboard shortcuts (when the editor has focus): Ctrl/Cmd+C copy, Ctrl/Cmd+X cut, Ctrl/Cmd+V paste after, Ctrl/Cmd+D duplicate.

Bars & chords

Add bars with + Bar. Click any chord cell and type a chord symbol. BassMuse understands a wide vocabulary:

• Triads and sevenths: C, Am, G7, Cmaj7, Dm7, F#m7b5
• Extensions: 9, 11, 13 (e.g. C13, Am11)
• Slash / inversions: C/E, G/B — the bass honours the slash note

More than one chord per bar

Set Grid to 1/8 or 1/16 and place chords on sub-beats. Each chord holds until the next; an empty cell holds the previous chord. In text form a bar looks like F@0 G@2 (F on beat 1, G on beat 3) or Am@0 Dm7@1.5 (change on the “and of 2”).

Style overrides — a different bassist per bar or chord

By default every bar plays in its section's style. You can override that for a single bar or even a single chord, so one passage struts a slap line while the rest of the section keeps its groove. The section's feel (density, swing, ghost, legato, …) still applies — only the bassist style changes.

• Per bar — click a bar number (the row above the chord cells) and pick a style, or Inherit section to clear it. Overridden bars are tinted in the style's colour.
• Per chord — right-click a chord cell and pick a style, or set the Style dropdown in the chord selector (§7). A chord override wins over the bar and the section, and the cell is framed in the style's colour. Choose Inherit bar / section to clear it.

Overrides are saved with the song and travel in shared .bmsong files; if a recipient doesn't have that exact style, the bar falls back to the section style.

Key

Leave Key on Auto and BassMuse detects the key from your chords (shown as “Key: C major”). Override it if you want a specific tonal centre — approach notes and walking lines respect the key.

Seed, octave & range

Seed rolls a new variation while keeping everything else fixed — click the dice button beside it to jump to a random seed, or the ▾ button to pick from the last 10 seeds you used (saved with the song). Octave transposes the whole part. Range (Low / High notes) folds every generated note by octaves to stay inside your bass instrument's playable window — handy when a sampled bass has a limited range. All three are global to the song.

7   The chord selector

Instead of typing, click a chord cell to open the circle-of-fifths chord selector — a visual way to pick chords that stay in key.

• Circle of fifths — outer ring is major roots, inner ring the relative minors, with the song key in the centre. Click a root to choose it.
• Type — major, minor, 7th, maj7, m7, and more.
• Intervals — toggle extensions (9 / 11 / 13, alterations).
• Bass — pick a slash-bass note for an inversion (e.g. C/E).
• Style — optionally override the bassist style for just this chord (see §6). Leave it on Inherit bar / section for the normal behaviour.
• Piano preview — shows the chord voiced once and centred on the keyboard, so you can see exactly what you're placing.
• Apply writes the chord (and any style override) to the cell; Clear empties it.

8   Styles & the feel knobs

A style models a bassist's characteristics — register, rhythmic feel, harmonic vocabulary and articulation — rather than any copyrighted transcription. Sixteen are built in:

The feel knobs

Each section has six knobs. Picking a style loads its default feel; tweak to taste.

You can also make your own styles as plain-text .bmstyle files — see §11 and the Appendix.

9   Drum kick-lock

The Drum slider locks the bass onsets to your kick drum, so bass and kick lock up rhythmically.

• At 0 — off; the bass plays its natural style groove.
• Toward 1 — bass onsets progressively snap onto the kick pattern. At full, the bass hits on every kick.

The section downbeat is always kept, and kick hits are never thinned out by the density setting, so the lock stays tight.

Feeding the kick

BassMuse listens for kick notes on MIDI channel 10 (General-MIDI kick notes 35 / 36) arriving at its own MIDI input. Send a copy of your drum (or just the kick) MIDI to BassMuse on channel 10 — a send/echo from the drum track, or a duplicated kick clip routed into BassMuse.

Chord-follow ignores channel 10, so live chords and kick-lock can share BassMuse's input at the same time — feed chords on any channel and kicks on channel 10.

Per-DAW kick routing

The goal is always the same: deliver GM kick notes (36/35) on MIDI channel 10 to BassMuse's MIDI input. How you deliver that channel-10 stream depends on how the DAW hosts BassMuse (see §12): either BassMuse sits in a track's MIDI chain and reads that track's MIDI, or it's an instrument fed from another track. In every case: get a copy of your kick as MIDI, set it to channel 10, and send it where BassMuse reads MIDI.

BassMuse in the track's MIDI chain — put ch10 kicks in that track's MIDI

These hosts run BassMuse in the track's device/FX chain, so it reads the track's own MIDI. Add the kick to that MIDI on channel 10:

• Reaper — on BassMuse's track, add the kick as a MIDI item set to channel 10, or route your drum track to this track with a MIDI send forced to channel 10. BassMuse (first in the FX chain) reads it.
• Bitwig — in the track whose device chain holds BassMuse, set the kick notes to MIDI channel 10 (Bitwig assigns a channel per note in the editor), or feed them from a clip on that track.
• Logic Pro — on the instrument track that has BassMuse in its MIDI FX slot, add a kick region and set its notes to channel 10 (Event List → Channel column), or route a second track assigned to the same instrument with channel-10 kicks.
• Mixbus 11 — like Reaper: place channel-10 kick notes on the instrument track that hosts BassMuse.
• FL Studio 2024 — inside the Patcher that wires chords → BassMuse → synth, also wire the kick MIDI to BassMuse's input, on channel 10.

BassMuse as an instrument — feed it from another track on ch10

These hosts load BassMuse as an instrument, so add a dedicated track that sends the kick to it on channel 10:

• Studio One 7 / Fender Studio Pro 8 — add an Instrument track, output = BassMuse, Channel = 10, kick notes 36/35.
• Cubase 15 — add a MIDI track, output = BassMuse, Channel = 10.
• Cakewalk Sonar — Insert ▸ MIDI Track, Output = BassMuse (Synth Rack), Channel = 10; enable Input Echo if auditioning live.
• Digital Performer — a MIDI track whose output is BassMuse's instrument, channel 10.
• UAD Luna Pro — an instrument/MIDI track routed to BassMuse on channel 10.

Pro Tools

Pro Tools hosts BassMuse only through a VST→AAX bridge (§13). Inside the bridge (Blue Cat PatchWork / DDMF Metaplugin), feed a channel-10 kick into the hosted BassMuse alongside the chords. If you use the MIDI-import workflow instead, do the kick-lock in the DAW where you generate the bass MIDI, then import the finished result.

10   Drag-MIDI & export

The Drag MIDI to your DAW strip prints your whole arrangement to a standard .mid file. Press and drag it straight onto a track in your DAW (or into a folder) and drop — you get a MIDI clip of the bass line.

This is the universal fallback: it works in every DAW with no routing and no format concerns, and it bounces down perfectly since it's just MIDI on a track. Use it whenever live routing is awkward, or for Pro Tools (§13).

Drag Chords — a chord track for piano/pad

Beside it, the Drag Chords to your DAW strip prints the arranger chords as sustained block-chord MIDI — drag it onto a piano, pad or synth track to comp under the bass. It voices the full chord (extensions and all), spread across the mid register.

File → Chord drag: omit low root (on by default) leaves the low end to the bass line; turn it off to add a low root that anchors the chords on their own. The choice is saved with the song.

11   Sharing: styles, songs, bundles

Everything BassMuse saves is plain text — no packs, no samples, no recompiling. Three file types:

Where files live

• Styles: Documents/BassMuse/Styles/*.bmstyle — loaded at startup and added to the Style dropdown.
• Songs: Documents/BassMuse/Songs/*.bmsong (you can save anywhere).

Rolling your own style

A .bmstyle is key = value lines with rhythm cell figures. You control register, swing, note-choice weights, velocity, articulation and feel. See the Appendix for the key list, and Documents/BassMuse/Styles/Reggae-OneDrop.bmstyle for a complete worked example.

12   Using BassMuse in your DAW

BassMuse's Follow-MIDI code is the same everywhere — only the host routing differs. There are three patterns:

• Model A — in-chain MIDI FX: BassMuse and the bass instrument live in one track's device chain (cleanest).
• Model B — instrument + MIDI-out route: BassMuse is an instrument on track A; its MIDI output feeds a second instrument track B.
• Model C — format-incompatible: the DAW can't load BassMuse's format (Pro Tools — see §13).

Waveform 14 (Tracktion) — step by step

Waveform runs a left-to-right plugin chain per track and passes MIDI down it, so BassMuse and the bass instrument live on one track (Model A). The signal path is chords → BassMuse → bass instrument.

1. Add a track — a normal track.
2. Drop BassMuse (VST3) into the track's plugin chain.
3. Add a bass instrument to the right of BassMuse in the same chain — Waveform's Collective (a bass patch) or 4OSC, or any bass VSTi. Order matters: BassMuse must sit before (left of) the instrument so its MIDI reaches it.
4. Set your chords. Song mode (BassMuse's own grid) is simplest and needs no routing. For Follow mode, put a chord MIDI clip on the same track ahead of BassMuse in the chain, or play chords live into the track.
5. Press Play. BassMuse locks to Waveform's transport and plays the bass line through the instrument, in time.
6. Optional — if nothing plays: drop a MIDI clip on the track spanning your arrangement. An empty clip is enough to keep the plugin chain processing.

Simplest alternative: skip the routing — use Drag-MIDI (§10) to drag BassMuse's bass line straight onto the bass instrument's track, then press Play.

Cakewalk Sonar — step by step

BassMuse and the bass instrument are two separate tracks — BassMuse emits MIDI, the synth makes the sound.

1. Bass VSTi track — insert your bass instrument as its own Instrument track; confirm it makes sound when you play notes on it.
2. BassMuse track — insert BassMuse as an instrument. In Views ▸ Synth Rack, right-click BassMuse ▸ Enable MIDI Output.
3. MIDI relay track — add a MIDI track; set Input = BassMuse (MIDI Output) and Output = the bass VSTi.
4. Turn on that MIDI track's Input Echo so MIDI passes through live.
5. Press Play. In Song/Demo source BassMuse generates on its own; in Follow source, feed chords to BassMuse's track (Sonar's Chord dock works).

Simplest alternative: skip the routing — drag BassMuse's MIDI straight onto the bass VSTi's track (not BassMuse's) and press Play.

13   Pro Tools

Pro Tools speaks AAX only and won't show BassMuse's VST3 or AU yet. Two workflows cover Pro Tools today:

Path 1 — import the MIDI (most reliable, no purchase)

1. Produce a bass .mid: use Drag-MIDI (or Save) from BassMuse in any other DAW you own, or the render_midi console tool (Appendix).
2. In Pro Tools: File ▸ Import ▸ MIDI… (or drag the file in) onto an Instrument track that has a bass instrument.
3. Native playback and mixdown — no routing, no bridge.

Path 2 — VST→AAX bridge (real-time)

1. Insert a bridge such as Blue Cat PatchWork (AAX) or DDMF Metaplugin on a Pro Tools Instrument track.
2. Inside it, load BassMuse (VST3) then a bass instrument (VSTi).
3. Route BassMuse's MIDI out → the instrument's MIDI in.
4. Feed chords to the track; Follow mode and Song mode both play.

A native AAX build (listed directly in Pro Tools) is planned for a future release.

14   Troubleshooting

Report a problem or request a feature

Click Report in the plugin header — it opens a short form and auto-fills your BassMuse version, OS and DAW — or visit the feedback page. Your bug, idea or question goes on the feedback board, where other owners can upvote it.

15   Appendix & reference

File locations

render_midi — console tool

Renders a progression to a .mid with no DAW:

render_midi --style motown --prog "Am7|D7|Gmaj7|Cmaj7" --bpm 96 --out bass.mid

Options: --style <id>, --prog "C|G|Am|F", --bpm, --seed, --density, --complexity, --out <file.mid>, --list.

.bmstyle keys

Rhythm cells

Each cell is one beat wide; onsets are fractions of the beat in [0,1), and the weight after | is its relative likelihood:

cell = 0                | 1     # a quarter note
cell = 0 0.5            | 3     # two eighths, weight 3
cell = 0 0.25 0.5 0.75  | 2     # four sixteenths
cell = 0.5 0.75         | 1.5   # off-beat figure
cell =                  | 1     # a whole-beat rest (space)

Chord symbols BassMuse understands

Roots A–G with #/b; qualities incl. m, 7, maj7, m7, m7b5, dim, aug, sus2/4; extensions 9 / 11 / 13; slash bass C/E. In text songs a chord may be positioned in the bar with SYM@beat (e.g. G@2).