Novation launched the original Bass Station in 1993 and it became an instant favourite. Its digital oscillators and analogue filter defined countless dance and electronic hits of the 1990s.

Equally at home on stage and in the studio, Bass Station II is a classic analogue synthesiser that can sound as warm and mellow or aggressive and hard as you want it to. Modulate the filter to make it sing, crank the distortion to toughen up that bass, and push the resonance to self-oscillation to get those lead lines screaming. If you're an inveterate envelope tweaker, the concept of sharing will never feel totally comfortable. Here, you can at least set the basic shape of both envelopes simultaneously, before flipping a switch and controlling the mod envelope alone to make fine adjustments. Perhaps this just felt easier, to me, than former Bass Stations because the sliders are a big improvement over the original knobs. I would say without hesitation that the plugin is clearly an inferior sound source to the original. Sequences are transposed by playing the keyboard, and if you want to break them up, gaps can be introduced non-destructively. When you turn the Rhythm knob all the way to the right, your sequences and arpeggios play as expected, but when you turn it to the left, an increasing number of rhythmic gaps are introduced, culminating in a spaced-out series of crotchets.In short, AFX Mode allows you to make changes to a sound for every key on the keyboard. This works by enabling an ‘overlay’ on any patch. Overlays are a modulation source which remembers knob and switch positions for 25 different keys (the length of the AFX Station’s keyboard). Outside of these 25 keys, the patch on top of which the overlay sits will play as normal. To the right, a Mixer section allows you to blend volumes of the Oscillators and the Sub, whilst a fourth dial here can be toggled between controlling external input volume, Ring Modulation, or a Noise Generator source. There's no screen or conventional menu system; the three-character display is perfectly adequate for patch selection and for showing the numeric values arising from panel tweaks. I frequently turned to the display when adjusting the various bi-polar controls, because spotting a '0' there was usually easier than finding the mid-point of a fairly small knob. An 'original value' display (consisting of two arrow-shaped LEDs) helpfully indicates whether the twiddled control is currently higher or lower than the value stored.

Because every key in the overlay can hold a different value for every knob or switch, you can go from subtle per‑key variations of a patch, to an entirely different sound on every key. There are just eight preset slots for overlays, and each of the 127 patches can reference one overlay. This means that if you change an overlay that is used in more than one patch, it will change for all patches. The limited display encourages you to use your ears rather than your eyes and is therefore no bad thing" Firstly you have a choice of Classic and Acid filter. The former is variable so the slope can be adjusted between 12 and 24dB and the type adjusted between low, band or high pass. The Acid filter, however, is a fixed 4-pole low pass based on diode ladder types ‘found in various synths popular in the 1980s’ according to the manual. We’re pretty sure they mean the aforementioned Roland TB- 303 as you get splashes of its acid like squealing across presets, but more on these later.

Synth

With the Bass Station II you get Ableton Live Lite, the lightweight version of one of the most popular digital audio workstationsaround to get started making music. And with Loopmasters you get access to a 4GB library of royalty-free samples to inspire or use in your music.

Note that you will need to have the latest version of each unit's firmware installed. This can be applied by running the relevant product's installer: Turning the large cutoff frequency knob is a smoothly satisfying experience, and the display gives a hint as to why this might be. Instead of the 128 possible values of a 7-bit MIDI controller, filter cutoff insists on twice that amount for itself. An extra bit is gained (rather neatly) by reserving two CC numbers instead of one, and this doubled resolution pops up in several other parameters, making a worthwhile contribution in each case. A brand new "Acid" filter joins the "Classic" original Bass Station filter -("Classic" switches between low, hi and band pass with 12 and 24dB slopes). Bass Station II ships with 64 factory patches and a further 64 user slots. Patch dump enables you to archive and swap soundsOK, I admit it, there's an arpeggiator too, but let's leave that for a moment, because it's such a pleasure to encounter a step sequencer on a modern synth. Perhaps it's my ongoing SH101 fixation, but I can't help noticing that, apart from the maximum length of a sequence (32 steps, compared to the SH101's 256), the two are functionally very similar. The Bass Station 2, though, has not one but four separate sequences to draw from. It even remembers them after a power cycle. These functions are usefully sub-labelled into separate areas; Mod Wheel and Aftertouch assignments, for instance, as well as 'further' options for the synth engine, including sync'ing oscillators 1 and 2 and setting a Swing value for the Arpeggiator engine, to name but a couple of examples. Bi-polar modulation is rife in the Bass Station 2 and for the filter, its sources are the mod envelope and LFO2. Ordinarily, with small controls, my preference is for positive modulation only, but here the ranges are so effectively spread over each half of the knob's travel that I forgot my usual prejudice. Generally, the panel has everything you'll need to program some quite intricate patches, either by modifying existing factories or by starting from an empty location and setting to it with gusto. Which is what I did next. Digging In The frequency triggered by each key press can be completely controlled, giving scales another dimension.