NAMM 2025: Beloved by many of electronic music's most significant figures (not least Aphex Twin, who was heavily involved in the launch of the Bass Station II back in 2013) and the instrument that arguably remains the spiritual flagship of Novation, the Bass Station has been a cornerstone of heavy-hitting low-end since its launch way back in 1993.
Now, a collaboration between the Bass Station's designers and soft synth polymath GForce Software has resulted in the definitive - and official - software version.
Though at heart an exacting emulation of the original hardware, the new software architecture allows this Bass Station to go well beyond many of the limitations of the original synth. And its feature set has been expanded quite significantly.
Perhaps the biggest talking points here are its broader 16-voice polyphony and unison mode (as well as a 'combined' setting). Using these in tandem, this software Bass Station will enable users to generate bigger, fatter and layered sounds of the sort that the original wasn't capable of.
Further new additions include a massively enhanced signal path, including new waveforms, an extra sub-oscillator (if things weren't quite bassy enough…), wider LFO possibilities, a more dynamic high-pass filter and filter key tracking. All of this does much to widen the Bass Station's scope.
Another major feature is the Bass Station's in-built arpeggiator and sequencer. This will enable users to program their own patterns and loops at will, with controls for step length, velocity, swing, probability, scales and an enticing randomisation feature.
By collaborating with GForce Software on this, Novation's beefy bad boy can now harness the wider flexibility of the soft synth maker's'X-Modifier technology. This modulation expander basically allows users to create detailed modulations on pretty much any parameter available.
If that weren't enough to satiate your low-end creative hunger pangs, there's also a big stack of effects to daube onto those bass sounds, or to use more subtly. Effects like distortion, chorus, delay and reverb can do much to colour low-end, and we're looking forward to working with this new palette.
If this sounds a little bit much to get your head around, then thankfully, 300 presets come fully-loaded, giving users perfect starting points across a range of styles and sonic characters.
All in all, this software Bass Station sounds pretty special, then. Especially for those of us who work solely in the box but yearn for some of those authentic, bone-shaking bass sounds of yesteryear.
GForce and Novation's Bass Station plugin is available for purchase directly from GForce for £99.99 + VAT (though there's a special introductory price of £49.99 + VAT until the end of February). It will also be available to all Novation Launchkey 4, FLkey, and SL Mk3 customers upon registration.
