TSE Audio

Whenever I am going for more gritty bass sound BOD is my go to. Thank you for this great free plugin.

So, I am not a bass player. I rarely use bass guitars/bass samples in my songs. Why would I want to write a review about BOD?

Because you should be encouraged to try it on anything else. This plugin changes the sound of whatever you put in it quite drastically in the dirty direction.

Of course BOD is quite usable for a deep distorted bass guitar. Do that. But does your synth bass line sound weak and boring? Plug one instance of BOD on it, turn up the drive to, say, 2 o' clock, tweak the other params ays you like, and you have quite suddenly a dark, merciless bass with lots of character. Even a simple sawtooth or square waveform change sound drastically, in addition to the distortion the high frequencies get filtered in a pleasant way.

Or take some lame old 808 samples and feed them to BOD. Or your voice. Or some mellotron string samples. BOD always adds its destinctive sound qualities, which may not always be what you want. I wouldn't recommend it on jazz productions or lush pop sound, but if you are in need of some bad-ass dirtbag, BOD is there for you.

The GUI, although mostly pitch black, is nevertheless quite usable because the knobs have bright yellow indicators and are big enough to handle with a mouse. The blend parameter is very useful if you want just a bit of the sound, the two eq bands are nice, but should be used with care as they add maybe too much in most situations.

You can change the quality between "hi" and "lo", but the plugin's CPU impact is all in all quite negligible on a modern computer.

This might not be the most flexible distortion plugin you own and you might not want to use it on every track, but it has character, albeit a mean and dirty one :-) and that's what you need once in a while.