At the time of writing, this doesn’t feature mute or solo buttons, necessitating a lot of needless fader dragging to hear layers in isolation, but FAW tell us that’ll be fixed in the next update. The three layers are edited in the tabbed Sound section, and blended in the Mixer below. With only 69 presets included, this flagrant sales pitching leaves a slightly bitter taste in the mouth, but SubLab is easy enough to program from scratch anyway, so it’s certainly no barrier to entry. The preset library is divided into six themed ‘Bass Packs’, of which more are on the way to buy separately. With its flat, attractively colour-coded interface (green for the Synth layer, orange for the Sampler and purple for the X-Sub), SubLab is easy to navigate and gives great visual feedback, from the oscillator waveform and envelope graphics to the spectrogram, which shows the frequency curves of the three layers together. A hybrid instrument, it enables a simple, analogue-style synth layer and the specialised X-Sub synth (see X-Sub focus) to be blended with an edited kick drum (or any other sound if you’re feeling adventurous) sample, before filtering and processing are brought into play, for the kind of floor-shaking tones so essential to today’s urban genres.

Sublab vst review