Peavey DPM Spectrum Bass

Released in 1993 for £279 GBP, the DPM Spectrum Bass was designed as the sound source for Peavey's MIDIbase, which was an actual bass guitar with built in MIDI!

Released in 1993 for £279 GBP, the DPM Spectrum Bass was designed as the sound source for Peavey's MIDIbase, which was an actual bass guitar with built in MIDI, but obviously the module can be used as a straight bass synth in it's own right triggered by MIDI in the traditional way from a keyboard or DAW

The Spectrum Bass is a 16-bit digital Sample & Synthesis unit with the raw samples being generated from a 1Mb ROM chip taken from Peavey's DPM3 synth series. Spectrum Bass does all types of electric bass guitar tones including upright and acoustic basses, but also plenty of synth bass sounds too, from harder, edgier digital style basses to dark subs.

The Spectrum Bass houses 200 presets, with presets 1-14 selectable from the front panel & the rest only accessible via MIDI Bank & program change commands. It's 8 note polyphonic & also four part multi-timbrel.

Patches can be layered to create up to 4 layer sounds, giving the Spectrum Bass actually far more than the 200 presets in terms of bass sounds it can produce. There is a full synthesiser inside, with samples feeding the oscillators, digital resonant filters, digital amp & filter envelopes, LFO's etc, but to access all that you need to go deep with MIDI Sysex.

Spectrum Bass was therefore primarily marketed as a point & shoot bass unit loaded with tons of bass sounds covering a vast palette of styles with many parameters adjustable via CC controllers including the ability to blend voice layers via CC control on the fly.

Added for posterity because it was so unusual & one of the rare 'bass-only' units from the era.