Bastl Kastle 1.5 – More Sustainable, USB Jack, New Sound Modes

The Bastl Kastle is a little gem synth. We immediately fell in love for it last year when we had a chance to try it (see our Kastle feature) and we’re glad to hear Bastl has just made it better.

Kastle 1.5 – What’s New
The new Kastle is more sustainable. The Bastl team changed the enclosure, from acrylic to fiberglass material which makes it very durable. The enclosure got smooth black matt finish with some silver and white touches and they also changed supplier for much better patch points.

It’s also easier to use, since they have added micro USB jack as a power alternative to the AA batteries.

Soundwise, the whole sound core got complete rework – making it sound much better! The ranges and smoothness is significantly increased enhancing the palette of the possible sounds.
There are now two sound generation engines running in parallel on the main output and on the secondary OSC output. You can either use them separately or mix them together by simply connecting them with a patch cable.
Therefore there are 3 new modes: the formant synthesis, noise mode and tonal noise mode.
These original modes are still there and got significant improvement: phase modulation, phase distortion and track & hold modulation.

The formant mode is inspired by the Helmholz Synthesizer – one of the first synths ever built by accessing different combinations of harmonics over fundamental – creating so called formants (vowels).

The noise modes are basically a granular playback of the flash memory (where the program is stored) of the sound processing chip. In other words it is a data player of a piece of computer code (that runs the sound core of the Kastle synth) that has very distinct sonic qualities on its own – often referred to as “glitch” in aesthetic terms.

Price and Availability
Available now for 80 Eur excl. tax thru select dealers. More information here.