Bass Station II Editor with AFX Mode Support

by Chadwick Wood
August 10th, 2021

The newest versions of Patch Base for Mac and iPad include editors and librarians for the Novation Bass Station II. Not only does Patch Base support editing every voice parameter on the BSII (including newer parameters such as fixed duration envelopes and Glide Divergence some undocumented parameters for the sub-oscillator), but the recent AFX Mode is also supported, with a full Overlay editor that also includes every parameter available.

Voice Editor

The Voice editor lays out every Bass Station II parameter on a single screen. The BSII has a lot of knobs that themselves allow for quick patch design, but many of the “deeper” parameters are a little buried behind Function keys that can slow things down. With Patch Base, you can Fetch the current voice settings after you make any tweaks on the BSII's knobs, and quickly try out more complex patch setups.

And as mentioned at the beginning, Patch Base gives access to some undocumented parameters for the Bass Station II's sub-oscillator.  Using the “Sub Mode” switch, you can select “Osc 3” mode which makes your sub-oscillator act the same as the other two oscillators, with the same wave shape, octave, and pitch and pulsewidth modulation options! We stumbled across these features as we were inspecting the BSII's patch data, and they can only be set using a full patch editor like Patch Base for now. Possibly Novation will announce these features in the future, but for now they didn't have any comment on it.

Overlay Editor (AFX Mode)

Patch Base now gives full editing capabilities for Overlays! You can see all of the settings for your overlays, and edit them in real-time, for a level of detail that even Novation's wonderful Components software doesn't give you. Again, the Bass Station II itself is great for creating Overlays and tweaking them, but when you want to fine tune them, or build them from a library of sounds, Patch Base is the go-to tool.

You can save individual overlay keys as Bass Station II patches, as well as load voice patches from your patch library as individual overlays. These tools enable you to create complex keyboard layouts and drum setups with a library of sounds you can build over time.

Bank Editors

Patch Base also has support for organizing, storing, and loading banks of 128 voice patches at a time, as well as 8 overlay banks as well, so you can fully back up all the settings from your Bass Station II to files.

To finish, here's a simple video showing the Voice and Overlay editors in action.