I've been using the Virus for more than a year now, mostly doing club music (techno, electro) but also downtempo and trip-hop.

I have to admit it's my first hardware synth and I was a bit scared by the interface (both hardware and software) but after reading the tutorial book it came with and watching the videos the Access guys keep making, I've grown very accustomed to it and I find it intuitive and easy now.

The grey metal, the pots and the wood sides make it a very nice and modern looking piece of gear in the studio, but it's not just about the looks. The Virus TI is very versatile, the Modulation Matrix can route 6 sources to 3 destinations each, it has pretty nice distortion, chorus, delay and reverb effects and I'm actually going to route sound from my Ableton Live to use its effects soon.

That being said, I should point out that the VSTI it comes with has its bugs. Still.. The guys keep working on it, I give them that, but it still has frequent moments when it just won't be recognised, having to unplug, plug and even reset from time to time to make it to work. When it does work, the USB sound quality is high, 24 bit 48Khz which sound quiter than the analog outs because the VSTI presumes you could run multiple sounds at one and won't risque overloading. Easily fixed by using Utility and increasing by about 6dB. Another nice thing about the USB outs is that you can route 3 different patches to External Instrument in Live and treat them separately. When using 3 fairly complex patches on the same USB out I often get note dropouts.

This song's bass and leads were made with the Virus:
Victor M - Silver Rush (Dirty Rework) by VictorM on SoundCloud - Create, record and share your sounds for free

Even when pushing its "dirtyness", it still sounds kind of clean. That's why I think it's great for Dance, Pop, Club or Chillout music.