dcthe studio
The dancecrave studio - instruments used for music production the studio -> novation 


Provides all sorts of interesting, wacky, zany or acidy sounds, or occasionaly a simple bass line :)


The Bass Station was originally available in the form of a small 2 octave keyboard (with octave shift) housed in a rather cheap looking plastic case. It had good sounds and as far as I know was Novation's first product of this type.

Since then the Bass Station sold well and Novation's products have improved in both features and apparent quality! By the time I decided to buy one they had just brought out the rack version so I got that.

Bass station - click for large picture
Novation Bass station rack

The Bass Station is an analogue style monosynth which offers almost full control of it's parameters over MIDI. It has 3 oscillators, - two of which combine to make the audible sound and the last one modulating that sound in some way giving vibrato or automated filter sweeps. 

MP3 filesize=462KA short demo of the Novation, infact the first time I played with it!

The Novation was aimed squarely at a hole in the market which was crying out to be filled, namely that created by the Roland TB303, or should I say the lack of it.


They must have been right because there is no shortage of TB303 clones out there now and there is even a very clever software 303 emulator for the PC, called Rebirth.


The synth has a characteristic sounding filter which can be driven into resonance, which sounds great clean and with distortion. I tend to have it permenantly connected to an old "Realistic" echo unit which is broken to the point of giving a nice overdriven sound! Realisic electronic reverb

Experiences

There are times when creating sounds that you just want to see knobs - one for each parameter, not a screen and a pair of data entry buttons. The Novation has been a wonderful entry level introduction into the analogue style of programming and has inspired many songs just because of it's open ended 'interface'. 

Though the unit was bought as a 'bass' unit it is just as good at making lead sounds, fill in sounds, pulsing sounds and weird effects, in fact I rarely use it for bass! 
 
 

Family

Drum Station
It had to happen. After producing an excellent clone of a classic bass synth but with more flexibility, they went onto drums with the Drum Station and it has all the classic dance drums loaded on board from the 808 and 909. 
Lots of lovely drum sounds!
Novation Drumstation
SuperNova
The next rack offering I saw from Novation is the SuperNova
 
Controllers

Recently I have seen a host of controllers from Novation. Two I have used recently are:


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