A couple of years ago, Baby Audio introduced their first ever softsynth, BA-1. At the time they asked me to provide some factory patches but, sadly, I was unavailable at the time.

I loved the synth though and created a signature soundset shortly afterwards, which focused on future-retro, cinematic sci-fi vibes.

Whilst making that set, I also found I was making some sounds with a rather 90s vibe, which I put in another folder. Later on, after BA-1 had an update which brought in an arpeggiator/sequencer, I made some more. BA-1 is an intuitive synth to use, which makes it a pleasure to programme with, and very quickly I had lots of lots of these sounds.

I mentioned these sounds when chatting with Baby Audio and it just so happened that they were planning to release some sound expansions focusing on 90s styles/genres in the summer. So it was a natural fit for a soundset by me to be included.

To give the soundset a little more focus, I decided to hone in on something of an inspiration favourite, the soundtracks to the Wipeout series of games. Despite being absolutely hopeless at them, I loved the design aesthetic, the world-building and, most of all, the music. The soundtrack was full of artists I was already hugely into, such as The Prodigy, Orbital, Future Sound of London, Leftfield and Elite Force. It was dynamic, energetic and utterly brilliant. And all these amazing 90s electronic artists were underpinned by the effervescent original score by CoLD SToRAGE (Tim Wright).

Despite its seemingly simple architecture, BA-1 was very effective for this sort of sound. It captures the analogue tone of the Yamaha CS-01 synth its emulating, and adds a few characterful bells and whistles that takes it into that classic 90s analogue-modelling territory. You can add plenty of space via the neat reverb and delay, as well as a bit of crunch from frequency modulation and distortion, and also some lo-fi goodness through that speaker and battery options.

It’s a fun little synth.

Hopefully you’ll be inspired by, and dropped into a warm puddle of reminiscnece by, my BA-1 Isotonik soundset, which is full of techno, big beat, breakbeat and trance vibes.

Isotonik will only be available from Baby Audio, as part of a bundle of four BA-1 sound expansions focused on 90s electronica.