Digitone is better for bass. 0-Coast can do bass, but when doing low-end it has a lot of boomy low midrange too which is hard to mix. I also find that without a filter the 0-Coast is mostly usable for leads and percussion. With a filter, it can do bass, but I often find I need to add an extra oscillator to get it really dense.
Unless you plan to get into Eurorack, I’d go with Digitone.
I would quibble that “better” is maybe not the right word. DN can make a wider range of conventional bass sounds since it has a resonant filter. But if you want a simple bass, the 0-Coast has a square wave and a triangle wave going through a LPG and that sounds clean and deep and fits in a mix with the standard eq.
Well sure, but if a square to a lpg is what you want, the 0-Coast is overkill. That is like buying a sand buggy to go grocery shopping. You could literally buy any oscillator and a cheap lpg (e.g. Pico, or Dynamix) and get the same for 200 €. The square doesn’t even do regular pwm.
0-Coast is an amazing synth, but it is not a bread and butter device. It is the fermented cabbage, your weird uncle brings to the christmas lunch that turns out to taste amazing, but also might be the reason your aunt is vomitting in the kitchen sink.
There are even better semi-modular “bass” synths out there in the same price range. SV-1, Microvolt, even the Mother-32 (although, don’t buy that, it will bore you).
This should be the official PR blurb
If anybody at MN is in this forum: Send me a Morphagene, and I will give you a year’s worth of flavor text.
I sold my 0-Coast to buy a Digitone and I don’t regret it 
Yeah but you’d need a powered case as well; granted, you could cobble a DIY case together and use one of those Frequency Central power supplies, but it wouldn’t all be in a nice enclosure like the 0-coast. Plus you get attenuated line/headphone out, MIDI in etc. which also would bring the cost up a lot if sourcing the same in eurorack modules.
I sold my 0coast to fund my digitone, mostly because i wanted poly. No regrets as I have other modular stuff/mono synth duties covered. All in all, the digitone is a far more versatile instrument.
Taxi cabs and lawn fertilizer!
…and an envelope generator (plus maybe a function generator) and a midi to cv module. Then you might as well throw in a mixer and a few other odds and bobs. Wait a minute suddenly this rig costs $1200! It’s almost like the 0-Coast is a great deal once you try to buy the pieces individually.
Indeed, the DT is actually my favorite device for making simple bass lines like that. But I also tend to use what is lying around, and the 0-Coast does the trick.
I would just send the square out to the trigger of the “slope” circuit and then use the EOC output to get variable PW. I admit that if you want classic PWM you should just just get a synth that does that without having to patch it. If I had an initial point it was that there is a great range of subtly in between square wave into LPG and making your aunt vomit in the sink.
Doepfer has a complete voice module that is 180€. It has a filter, a sub and variable pw, a traditional saw wave. 0-Coast is a fantastic deal as a building block for a system or for doing weird sound design, percussion, fold-y leads, but youncan go a lot cheaper for a simpe square. A Moog Werkstatt can do it (I’ll sell you mine, for real cheap).
I love the 0-Coast enough that I bought a DPO, Contour, Maths and a Wogglebug, all because of wanting more of what it has to offer. It is fantastic. No matter how much gear I hoard, it always makes its way to my setup.
But if you want to do bass, I would advice anyone to buy something that is easier to sculpt in the low frequencies. A filter, or a sub or even a second, regular oscillator (slope tracks like shit, so it does not count imo).
Getting Digitone to do a regular-sounding square is much less hacky than making 0-coast sound like anything but the lsd-infused hallucinations of a madman and synth-scientist that it is (god bless Tony Rolando, who deserves every dollar he sucked from my bank account).
If Make Noise came out with a carrier pigeon, I’d sell my iPhone. But not for bass.
Digitone can create a huge variety of sounds. Based on the demos I’ve seen the 0-coast can create analog farts and random bleeps.
And I say this as a lover of bleepy bloop noise.
huge fan of Make Noise stuff. I no longer own the 0-Coast. but that’s only because I own a Shared System Plus, with another skiff of Make Noise stuff added to it for good measure. I also own a Digitone. for bass and “environments” (which I take to mean more ambient/spaced out sorta sounds…) I would absolutely recommend the Digitone. it can certainly do bass, and you can probably do that with the 0-Coast reasonably well too (but less-well than with DN). but you can’t do ambient/spaced out sounds with the 0-Coast as well; for that, you’d want polyphony and effects, and the DN has those.
For bass, Digitone has subharmonics (ratio < 1), unison, stacking 4 different sounds, and filters with resonance to either tame trebles or enhance lower frequencies. Oh, and portamento. Plus 2 LFOs. And patches, which can be handy.
0-Coast gets nowhere near this, it’s an amazing monosynth if you like its peculiar sound or pair it with e.g. A4.
But they’re not really comparable imo.
Digitone is very rewarding if you focus on it, it can give you excellent bass, and way more.
I think maybe a more fair comparison would be making music with a digitakt + 0-coast or a digitone, obviously the cost would be different but if you went in with a digitakt and 0-coast thinking you would make all your samples with the 0-coast and sequence it live for an extra melodic or textural part I think you would find that you would get a really solid results. Still a bit of a salad dressing and emu farm comparison though.
Digitone can do bleepity bloops also, quite easy actually. Get a long sustained note then go to town twisting random knobs while in live record mode. Next thing you know you’ll think you’re in a Richard Devine YouTube vid.
Oddly specific though
They do sound pretty good together:
