Novation • K-Station
The K-Station is a whole new take on the original Bass Station Keyboard that put British synth makers Novation on the analog synth map! Essentially, the K-Station is an extremely well laid-out and superbly designed 2-octave keyboard version of their new A-Station rack module. It features 8 voices of analog modelled sounds with FM, 12-band vocoder, arpeggiator, reverb and delay effects, 400 user rewritable program memories, and more. Unlike the crowded interface and puny LCD display screen found on the A-Station, the K-Station has a beautiful layout with easy access to its knobs, sliders and buttons. And finally there's a large LCD display!
It has 25 knobs for real-time control, and all knobs transmit MIDI controller messages. The K-Station has three oscillators which provide sawtooth, triangle, sine, pulse width modulation and other waveforms. There's even a simple FM synth engine which can be dialed in for sharpening the sound. Oscillators may be set to Unison or Sync'd operation and a Noise source is also included in the waveform engine. There is a nice lowpass resonant filter with switchable 12 or 24dB/oct slopes and ADSR controls. A second ADSR envelope is available for the oscillators, as well as two LFOs with sample-and-hold and MIDI sync.
On-board effects include reverb and delay/chorus/flanger. Their send levels can be controlled by the Mod wheel which is a nice effect. A 12-band vocoder is also on-board for processing external mono sounds such as drum loops or vocals. The K-Station's pads sound great when vocoded with external sounds. External sounds can also be used as an oscillator, run through the filters, envelopes, etc. with much better results than were possible on the original Bass Stations. There's even a built-in Arpeggiator whose speed synchronization and sweep range can be stored with the program for instant recall. The K-Station is really an expressive, compact keyboard that's a hand-on joy to use and is just full of clean analog sounding synth bass, punchy leads, pads, filter sweeps and more! The K-Station is a great piece of kit for professionals and beginners alike! Be sure to also check out the expanded larger keyboard versions: KS4, KS5 and KS Rack.
