Arturia’s new “Bass Design Synthesiser” treats the sub as the star of the track, not just its foundation.

Arturia has announced Pure Sub, a synthesizer plugin dedicated to a single job: designing bass. Where most synths treat the low end as one voice among many, Pure Sub splits it into three independently shaped layers — sub, harmonics, and texture — and wraps them in processing built specifically for weight, impact, and movement.

Why a synth just for bass

Arturia frames Pure Sub as a response to how bass has evolved in modern production. Across dubstep, drum & bass, and club music generally, the low end has moved from “the foundation under the track” to the lead voice — the hook, the signature, the drop. Producers now spend hours sculpting a single sub, and Arturia is positioning Pure Sub as the first instrument built to treat that process as a craft in its own right, rather than an afterthought bolted onto a general-purpose synth.

Under the hood: three stages, shaped independently

Pure Sub’s engine is split into dedicated sections that can each be shaped on their own terms:

• Sub — the fundamental, controllable independently of everything layered on top of it.
• Harmonics — a dual-mode oscillator engine (waveforms like Unisaw and Unisquare) for morphing timbre from clean 808s to wide Reese basses.
• Texture — noise and sample layers that can be blended in to help the bass cut through on smaller speakers and systems.

Because the fundamental and harmonics are controlled separately, sound designers can even drop the sub out entirely and build upper-bass layers to stack on top of a separate low end.

A standout feature here is Sub Regen, which restores a clean, undamaged fundamental at practically any point in the signal chain — meaning producers can push aggressive filtering and distortion elsewhere without ever losing low-end phase or amplitude integrity.

Processing built for hitting hard

Pure Sub pairs its sound-generation engine with processing aimed squarely at impact:

• 40+ filter modes, feeding a Sub Processor — a bass-focused chain of distortion, texturizing, and shaping tools.
• An FX rack with parametric EQ, multiband processing, panning, pitch delay, and reverb.
• A new distortion module with built-in EQ, so producers can boost or cut frequencies and reshape the resulting timbre — with key-tracking available to keep that timbre consistent across the keyboard.
• A Maximiser with a Hard mode for adding clipping grit on top of loudness and pump.

Motion and modulation

To keep basses from sitting static, Pure Sub includes three envelopes, six customizable modulators (function, random, and mod-sequencer types), and macro controls, all of it responsive to full keyboard expressivity including MPE. Modulators can even be layered onto each other — dragging one modulation directly onto another modulation’s amount lets a single macro fire multiple modulations simultaneously.

A built-in randomization (“dice”) feature can reroll any stage of the instrument — oscillator, harmonics, texture sample, filter type, Sub Processor mode, macros, even envelope shapes — for instant new starting points.

A few sound-design tricks Arturia is highlighting

Alongside the plugin, Arturia’s materials point to some practical techniques the design is built to support:

• Resampling for variation — assigning a random modulator to a few parameters and retriggering it on every note or bounce, so material comes out slightly different each time.
• Noise for translation — adding texture noise creates a psychoacoustic effect that keeps bass audible even on speakers too small to reproduce the fundamental directly.
• Notch sweeps via the FX rack — dropping extra filter instances into the FX chain and key-tracking or modulating their cutoffs independently for more complex movement than the main filter section alone provides.

Price

Get Pure SUB for $/€49, or access personalized pricing on V Collection 11 Intro or Pro and get Pure SUB free. (Valid until September 15)

More info here: Arturia | Pure Sub