It’s just a synth that specialises in generating bass tones — albeit it might be intended to be an all-rounder (hence the fact the one I’ve just discovered being marketed as a bass and lead synth) but becomes famous for its bass.

Think Roland’s TB-303 and Moog’s Minimoog for the most famous examples, but these days there are a number of options … particularly VSTi ‘soft’ synths e.g. Native Instruments’ Massive (without which, there’s a good chance Dubstep might not sound the way it does and might never have taken off to the extent it did).

My new one can sound like other synths if you create your patches the right way but what drew my attention was the distinctly rough sound a lot of the presets have … like they’ve been bitcrushed and/or distorted in some way — there’s a grittiness to them that I haven’t heard before (even after bitcrushing and/or adding distortion).

And, as I said, the flexibility to route the oscillators into the morphing engine and control different aspects of the process is pretty sweet: there’s a remarkably quick-and-easy workflow that means you can just click on the things you want and have the sound come out in the way you wanted, rather than having to read a user manual the size of War And Peace that presupposes you got a double First in Mathematics and Physics and then did a PhD in Acoustic Engineering, working for NASA for ten years, identifying materials defects from the sound reflected off the back walls of wind tunnels.