Feature | 30 Years
WHAT IS IT?: VIRTUAL ANALOGUE SYNTH AND DANCE MEGASTAR | LAUNCH YEAR: 1997
FROM DEPECHE AND JARRE DOWN EVERYONE NODS SAGELY WHEN YOU SEE A VIRUS IN THE STUDIO
In the 1990s, Access were creating MIDI controllers for the likes of Oberheim and Waldorf but it wasn’t a direction the company would pursue for long. “We found that building our own synthesiser would be much more fun,” they decided. More fun and successful as it turned out. What they built would define tracks and genres well into the next century.
The Access Virus (which became ‘A’) was their first release. While probably not a name synth manufacturers would choose these days, this Virus was very much something people wanted back in the ’90s. On the face of it, it was an out and out virtual analogue machine but actually had a few digital elements in its signal path that would give it the edge over the Nords and Novations of the time. Yet it was those big, analogue dance sounds that it became famous for. It could produce precise, physically modelled recreations of anything the electronic music producers of the time required: supersaws, 303s, huge leads, arpeggiations and deep sub basses.
Not only did Access deliver the sounds, it became one of the coolest synths to own in the latter part of the decade. If you had Access, you had the keys to the VIP areas of clubland.
What we said at the time
“Sure, the Virus is no super-synth, and in many ways the Supernova and Z1 are far superior synths. But that’s not the point. The Virus is relatively simple to use, once you’ve hiked up the steepish learning curve that is, and it fulfils a healthy range of useful functions. It’s great as either a dance module or an extra source of some quality analogue-style sounds. This Virus is catching.”
Legacy
The original Access Virus was a 12-note polyphonic synth that, given its red finish, was initially rather lazily seen as a Nord Lead clone. But its effects, 16 parts of multitimbrality, multiple outputs and sonic architecture – 64 digital waveforms on top of the traditional saw and square waves plus two flexible filters – very much gave it its own character and audience. You could get more than ‘just’ a virtual analogue sound by employing the digital waveforms, while 16 parts of multitimbrality enabled the Virus to handle every track a dance anthem needed.
And that’s pretty much what it ended up doing, and so successful was it that Access quickly released the follow up, the B (pictured), in 1999 (along with a rack, keyboard and compact keyboard versions) and then the C (with similar alternatives) in 2002. The Virus became one of the first great synths to be used in software on both the Pro Tools and TC Powercore platforms in the 2000s, and this computer linkage continued in 2009 with the Virus Ti. This became the ultimate Virus, adding computer inte
