The top right of the window is for metering, and some mix functions. As with the filter, there are wet/dry controls for both distortion and compressor, so they can function as parallel effects. The compressor is a standard affair, although it does have an auto sidechain function, which enables the kick sample to carry over the top of the bass synths if you wish. There are 4 different flavours of distortion, with a low and hi-cut to control where it affects the tone. These two effects are built-in to the machine, at the bottom of the GUI. They both give control and tone flavour to the bass sound. The effects that I often utilize when working with bass are compression and distortion.

Next to that is a simple one slider per engine mix window, which enables you to get the right balance between the sounds. Moving down the left-hand side, at the bottom of the window is the low/band/highpass analog emulated filter with wet/dry mix for the synth and Sample engines. Essential for your 808! The sub-bass is a pure sine, but with a harmonics control separate from the root harmonic (more on this later) and a visualization of where the root and harmonics are playing note-wise. Below the sampler is a window showing the root note and octave, and fine-tuning options. You can choose whether to loop, and if you want to pitch track the sample or not.

The sampler is a simple affair – with parameter control over the start and end of the sample, the start and end of a loop point, with crossfade, and an AR volume envelope. You can also drag and drop your samples into the engine. The sample engine has a drop-down menu with all the kicks listed, sampled from great analog machines such as Vermona, 707, BIA, Jomox, etc. There are 3 ADSRs to tweak volume, pitch, and filter. The Synth engine has 4 different waves visually represented in the middle of the window. They’re represented by 3 different colors, and can be clicked between by selecting the name at the top of the window. The three engines sit on the left-hand side of the GUI, in a single window.

Sub lab vst