“It’s a mighty emulation of an emulation of an emulation”: GForce Novation Bass Station review

What is it?

If you were a dance music producer back in the early 1990s, you wanted the sound of a Roland TB-303 to provide the thumping and squealing bass and lead lines in your music at whatever the cost, simple as that. The trouble was, that cost was rapidly increasing. With only 10,000 of the original units made, secondhand prices had shot up to a mighty £700 minimum (yes, that is peanuts compared to today’s – oh, we wish for a time machine), and such was the demand, that synth manufacturers started to think about analogue synthesis again, and releasing 303-alike hardware synths – previously unthinkable in those digital times.

Yet rather than Roland doing it, the unlikely saviour for the 1993 dance music producer came in the form of Novation with only its second hardware release, the Bass Station. This diminutive keyboard came with just seven presets, and wasn’t exactly cheap, but at £350 was still just half the price of the real thing, and delivered enough squeal to become the backbone of many a 1990’s production.

Purists will tell you it wasn’t quite a TB-303 – itself a unit originally trying to emulate bass sounds for organists – but everyone else will tell you that it filled a huge gap in the market and stamped the Novation name on music production. Bass Station became a landmark release in music production and now it’s back in software. An emulation of an emulation of an emulation? Quite a bit more, as it goes.

Pricing

• Full price: £99.99
• Special introductory offer £49.99 (excl. VAT)

GForce Novation Bass Station was first launched on 21/01/2025

Owners of the Novation Launchkey MK4, FLKey, or SL MK3 can get the GForce Novation Bass Station plugin for free. You can claim this special offer by logging in to your Novation account.

Performance

We can’t pretend that we weren't slightly skeptical when we heard the news about GForce’s latest synth plugin. The 303 has long been worshipped and still seems to fly in and out of fashion, but there are many, many clones in both hardware and software, not least made by Roland itself (the Cloud and several hard devices) and Novation (with its latest Bass Station II incredibly still available new after more than a decade).

However, Novation seems to have added just enough to retain the original spirit but move the concept on ‘beyond the squeal’. Most notably there are up to 16 notes of polyphony – the original was proudly mono – new oscillator additions, sequencer, and, like other recent GForce releases including the recent Axxess, other modern niceties like effects and the company’s X-Modifiers for boosted modulation creativity.

The core signal path is still those two analogue-style multi-wave oscillators, but these have been enhanced with FM, noise modulation, and a sub on Osc 1. You also get the original switchable 12dB/24dB filter, two envelopes, and a multi-wave LFO.

The extra effects are distortion, chorus, delay, a high-pass filter, and reverb, while the X-Modifiers are – as with all GForce’s latest releases – a great addition, allowing you to apply an LFO (XLFO) and envelope (XADSR) to most parameters (and effects) which ups your sound design ammo.

These additions really do bump up the sonic potential and perhaps move the synth on too far – the extra polyphony alone takes Bass Station away from the original synth so dramatically that you could start questioning authenticity, or mentioning words like ‘Supernova’ and ‘Peak’. However, you’re immediately in 303 territory thanks to the synth’s presets which – initially anyway – will transform you back three decades and more.

There are plenty of acid lines – of course, there are – and the on-board arpeggiator and sequencer both come into their own here. However, you also get some wonderful drones and ambiences that were difficult, if not impossible, to wrestle from the original. The knarl is there, for sure, but so much more is on offer, and it’s not too far away, especially with the dramatic effects and X-Mod options on hand.

Verdict

Whichever way you look at it, you’ll likely have a plugin synth within your DAW that can do some, if not all, of the virtual analogue heavy-lifting that Bass Station specialises in. And while the synth very much broadens the original synth’s sonic palette, its specialty is clearly still the 303 in as many variations as that delivered, although even that was actually way more than you might think.

Whether you need that in your life is very much down to the music you make, but this GForce recreation puts this particular Bass Station into way more genres than the original, and any bass-heavy music producers will be able to lean heavily into it. Like Oddity, Axxess and so many other GForce recreations, it can ‘do the original’ majestically if you choose, but so much more besides.

So if the thought of 16-voice acid lines kicks the old serotonin into life – and just that thought alone makes us warehouse levels of sweaty – then this could be the start of yet another 1990s revival or new rave 2025, take your pick.

GForce Bass Station is currently half-price at £49.99 and comes free with certain Novation products including FL Key and SL Mk3.

Hands-on demos

GForce Software

YouTube

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Alternatives

Roland Cloud TB-303: $29.99 at roland.com

The most realistic software emulation of a 303 out there, so truer than a Bass Station but nowhere near as flexible.

Read the full Roland Cloud TB-303 review

Arturia Acid V: $199 at arturia.com

Very decent 303 emulation, but buy it as part of V-Collection if you can, as the standalone price is high.

Read the full Arturia V Collection X review

Audiorealism Bass Line 3: £99 at audiorealism.onfastspring.com

ABL3 blows the competition (including ABL2) out of the water in almost every respect.

Read the full AudioRealism Bass Line 3 review

Specifications