V-Station

This will be the first proper VSTi that I've actually walked in to a shop and bought: and this was purely on the quality of the presets that came with the Demo!

Well, there's no denying that it's a Novation. To be fair, I'm into my Trance/Dance/Big-Beat style music and had been using Reason as my sole source for synths until I got this and Cubase. The presets just blew me away, the filters are warm and sound just incredible: I couldn't believe that this sound was coming out of my speakers... usual superlatives and so on - you get the picture...

So what do you get? 3 Oscillators, 2 LFOs, FM modulation, dedicated effects and that big fat Novation badge stuck across the GUI. It's easy to use, with intuitive menus. If you already own a K-Station, the interface is almost identical and you can send patches between the two. This also means that V-Station owners can import K-Station patches from the Novation website :) Patches are orginised in intervals of 10, so 100 is Bass1, 110 is Bass2 and so on. This makes it easy to browse similar sounding patches without having to guess the patch number.

I'll say it again, it sounds great. I thought this was going to be a dance machine but it really is so much more. I can get Vangelis style leads, Kraftwerk-y triads and a load of other bleeps, whilstles and sweeps out of this thing. And to think, I was going to get the Model-E instead...

Downsides: It can be a CPU hog, especially with some of the arpeggios and long decay notes. SL sort of slows slightly in some instances but catches up with itself once the first few notes are played. Bear in mind that this is me running 4 V-Stations, Effects and Reason at the same time... Note also that you're Restricted to 8 Note polyphony per instance (though you can run it in Monophonic mode and fatten things up with 8 detunable voices). Freeze helps though (SL/SX2 and Logic?).

So many things to explore with it, but I still find myself tweaking presets instead of creating patches from scratch. I'll get round to it one day though...

great.

benwRead Review