Swifty x Bass Station: A Visual Remix Decades in the Making

The new Swifty x Bass Station II is more than just a cool-looking synth – it’s a monument to 35 years of cultural and technological revolution.

We asked ChatGPT ‘What do Novation Bass Station and Ian ‘Swifty’ Swift have in common?‘

After one false start (it guessed, wrongly, that Ian was a 90s rave MC), it spewed 500 words of word salad about both being influential names in their respective fields in the same era.

In fairness, that’s true, but misses two important things. Firstly, Swifty’s just supplied a new Bass Station II design. Secondly, the influence of both is felt by countless people without them knowing. 

Ask anybody in graphic design and they’ll say Swifty’s a legend, ushering in a new era of magazine, font, and flyer design, but they’d probably assume a ‘base station’ is a wireless iPad charger. 

And before we laugh at those ignorant art folk, how many of you would’ve challenged ChatGPT’s first guess?

But yes, Chat-bloody-GPT was partly right. Except we aren’t regurgitating what other people said, we chatted with the man himself, and have personally released records with every Bass Station since the mid 90s. 

For now, though, let’s start at the beginning.

Few synths boast Bass Station’s staying power. The brainchild of British designer Chris Huggett, it was the right synth at the right time, launching in 1993, when digital synths had dominated the previous decade. 

People missed the knobs of analogue classics, but not flakey tuning, crackling faders, lack of MIDI, or suddenly rising prices. 

Sporting pristine knobs for every function, MIDI, solid tuning, and an affordable price, Bass Station was, therefore, the answer to many prayers. Plus it could do a fair 303 impression – an en vogue but increasingly-unaffordable luxury.  

Unsurprisingly, it sold like hot cakes, and 1994’s rackmount variant brought further upgraded features.

Meanwhile, Swifty too spent the early 90s shaking up an industry. Having emerged from Manchester Polytechnic (now Manchester Metropolitan University), he’d gone straight to work for legendary monthly style magazine, The Face. He was soon designing record covers for what he describes as “very weird acts” before taking the design reins at fabled music magazine, Straight No Chaser.

“That was with a guy called Paul Bradshaw,” explains Ian. “He said ‘Oh, I know this guy… DJ… he's starting a label and it's gonna be part of Phonogram.’”

[quote align=right text="Just as the Bass Station raised the electronic music bar with affordable tech, Ian harnessed the growing availability of affordable, high-quality printing. Suddenly flyers became works of art themselves"]

The Label was Talking Loud and the DJ was Gilles Peterson, the influential industry force who brought us acid jazz. 

A slew of era-defining record covers followed, Swifty’s designs cutting through from cool stores to the highstreet shelves of Virgin Megastore and WHSmith.

He had another, often overlooked, influence too.

“Simultaneously I got involved with the club scene and started designing flyers,” Ian remembers. “Most a black-and-white, photocopied, post-punk aesthetic. Suddenly you got this piece of proper design.”

Just as the Bass Station raised the electronic music bar with emerging affordable tech, Ian harnessed the growing availability of affordable, high-quality printing. Suddenly flyers became works of art themselves.

Perhaps that’s the story of the 90s? A convergence of emerging technology and a cultural wave meant new musical subgenres emerged almost monthly, and design was the same.

“The beauty of a magazine is that it can constantly evolve,” agrees Ian. “I designed a font and it would appear in Straight No Chaser. But the inception of that font might have started out on a club flyer.

In another creative parallel, computer-based MIDI sequencing allowed more producers than ever to make and release records… quickly. And while new tools greatly influenced the output, particularly synths like the Bass Station, the process itself was surprisingly unchanged, just more streamlined and accessible. And everything was still distributed physically. 

It was the same in design and publishing.

“The technology did dictate the aesthetic,” confirms Ian. “It was still a hybrid situation where you'd be using old cut and paste methods but mixing it with digital. It was all freehand and Quark Express in them days. There was no Illustrator or Photoshop.

“You used to send artwork off as a mechanical and the printers would do everything else.”

As the calendar rolled to 1997, the UK’s electronic music scene approached its zenith. Dance culture was mainstream culture, and Novation’s Super Bass Station went appropriately big. Adding a sub oscillator and other improvements, this was a powerful monosynth, complete with Roland-esque chorus and crunchy distortion for 303 acid. 

In many ways, though, the next iteration was the most telling, despite being largely forgotten now. 2003’s Virtual Bass Station plugin typified a seismic shift, not only in music production and design, but in music and media consumption generally. Expensive hardware gave way to cheaper software. And this was mirrored in the design world.

“It's the digital revolution isn't it?” says Ian. “Those years were interesting. When ‘Layers’ came in on Photoshop that was a big breakthrough – you could step backward anywhere in your history. Prior to that you could just undo the last movement.” 

Total recall and automation had the same effect on music production, of course.

But there was another revolution – the near total death of physical mediums. Print magazines closed, CD plants shut down, and vinyl presses fell silent. Unlimited creative power came at the expense of revenue and, consequently, budgets. Producers and designers went in the box. Design and music became disposable. 

After a decade, though, things began to change. Veteran producers had been so busy debating analogue versus digital sound that they'd missed some fundamentals, like tactile and programming a synth then recording the results. 

The time was right to resurrect a 90s icon. Thus, Bass Station II was born.

It combined our favourite bits of the original (keys) and the Super variant (sub oscillator), then added extras like filter modes and fader controls, plus modern enhancements like enhanced memory, USB power and connectivity, and step sequencing. 

Thanks to its combination of analogue circuitry and digital control, the last decade has seen some extraordinary features and functionality added, including a milestone overhaul by none other than Aphex Twin. In fact, it’s come so far that anybody who tried Bass Station II at launch simply won’t believe what it can do now.

For example, did you know this supposedly paraphonic synth lets you play and sequence triad chord progressions? Or that you can sequence entirely different patches per note, turning it into an analog drum machine? 

[quote align=right text="Anybody who tried Bass Station II at launch simply won’t believe what it can do now"]

It’s a perfect combination of traditional, classic technology with modern comfort and versatility, which is why Bass Station II has been in continuous production for 11 years. 

The time feels right, then, for this fresh new design.

“I hardly do commercial graphics now,” says Ian. “When this project came along it was really nice to go into the archives, pull out some iconic work, and use that as a launch pad.”

But how did a man who’d never touched a synth get started? It began with “minimal cool”.

“I'm really into Rams,” Ian continues. “The industrial designer who did all the stuff for Braun in the 50s and 60s. A lot of that is white.”

And the colours?

“On the original Bass Station there’s a little blue bar. But it only really took off when I put the knobs in orange. 

“It goes back to my two-colour club flyers. You picked two colours that work really well together. Blues and oranges. Blues and yellows. Opposite ends of the spectrum.”

Interestingly, Ian had no idea that Novation’s other successful 90s rackmount, Drum Station, featured an orange bar. And then a yellow one for the Mark 2.

[quote align=right text="They've given it to someone who doesn't know what the fuck they're doing. That's when beautiful things happen, because you're thinking intuitively"]

“I just split everything off into the different compartments and made these funky shapes,” he continues. “Then it developed and I put the arrows in. I've used arrows a lot in my art.”

It took a few rounds of designs to finalise.

“It was quite demanding,” admits Ian. “I mean, I don't know what an oscillator is! There's all these little squiggles and little funny little weird marks. I'm like ‘What's that?’”

Ultimately, though, it worked.

“They've given it to someone who doesn't know what the fuck they're doing. That's when beautiful things happen, because you're thinking intuitively.” 

The results are powerful. Sitting down to use this freshly overhauled synth, it’s easy to feel confused and overwhelmed at first, as most synths look pretty similar, and we instinctively know what each section does. 

But stick with it. 

Swifty’s design pushes you to interact differently, those arrows pulling you from section to section in unfamiliar orders. 

The creative effect is as powerful as any new features, the resulting reinvention a testament both to the decade-long evolution of Bass Station II and the power of design itself.

So there it is, the story of the Bass Station II Swifty Edition. Bass Station charts not just the history of our industry for the last 30 years, but every industry… our broader society even. Who knows where Novation will take their legacy next, but as our world knocks on the door of the AI-era, the value of this shared legacy and innate desire for tactile creativity has never felt more important… nor Bass Station II more relevant. 

Photography Alex Green | @alexgreenav.

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