Anyone who’s ever had a band knows that a competent/punctual/well-adjusted bass player can be the hardest thing to find — guitarists are dime-a-dozen, but bass players always seem to be in particularly high demand. Well, here’s a potential answer straight out of Futurama – a MIDI-driven bass robot to hold down the bottom end for you! It’s called the MechBass, and it was built by one James McVay, an honors student at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand — we first spotted it at Hack A Day, where there are plenty of details about how the robot was designed and assembled. There’s also a video of MechBass ripping out the bassline to Muse’s “Hysteria”, which you can watch after the jump.