I’ve been watching the work of Bastl Instruments for a long time, and you may remember me posting about their awesome Kastle micro (or perhaps it is nano-modular) last year.
Well now there’s a full documentary about their work. I haven’t had time to watch all of it as yet, but I certainly will as I think that their products are excellent, fun, and a great place to start if you’re interested in hardware and micro-modular synths.
I’m a fan of Bastl and I have been since I first saw them in Frankfurt in 2014. They’re makers of excellent hardware and ever since I first met them they’ve made more and more excellent devices.
I met them in Berlin this year at Loop, as they were running a workshop and I was using the space for a workshop directly after them. They were kind enough to provide me with one of their new Kastle synths. I posted about Kastle a few weeks ago. It’s an awesome little device and packs way more punch than you’d ever think from a tiny little micro modular.
Bastl’s latest video on Kastle gives a detailed walk through of the synth and is really worth watching. But be warned, you might not be able to turn back!
But of course Bastl Instruments do so much more, and in fact their latest foray into DIY is a cause for celebration in itself. OMSynth miniLab is a circuit development and performance interface designed to help inventors quickly build and experiment with creative circuits. It was designed with beginners in mind but is perfectly suited for seasoned builders and complex circuit development.
In many ways OMSynth miniLab seems like a likely successor to Teenage Engineering’s now discontinued OpLab, although in many ways a lot more hands on and experimental. This is a device that could get people involved in some real experimentation, which can only be a good thing as far as I’m concerned.
If that wasn’t enough Bastl have also announced bitRanger ADDON boards, BITBOARD & SYNAPSIS. bitRanger in itself is an excellent experimental synth and these new add ons take it up to the next level. The BitBoard is a breadboard add-on module that allows users to build custom circuits and user interfaces for the BitRanger, and the synapsis is a 4×4 pushbutton matrix that offers performative control of the Bit Ranger.
When you add all of this up, what you get is a synth company who are really pushing the boundaries of modular, of experimentation, and of miniaturisation too. These are not easy boundaries to push. What Bastl are doing is hard, and yet they make it seem easy, effortless. That requires real skill and a generous helping of excellent design talent.
Personally, I think that Bastl have a very bright future. Who knows where they’ll go next, but wherever it is it’s going to be exciting and probably break some new ground. I’ll be watching whatever it is they do in 2017, and I bet it’ll be great.
I’ll leave you with this interview with Bastl after the workshop they did at Loop.
I was lucky enough to bump into the guys from Bastl Instruments at Ableton’s Loop Summit. They were running workshops building their Kastle micro modular synth in the space I was using after them. I’ve bumped into these guys once before a few years ago at Musik Messe, but this time I got to spend a bit more time with them, and they’re really cool.
But enough of that for now. What I did do is get a chance to take a longer look at the Kastle synth and have a really long play with it.
The Kastle synth is tiny. I mean really tiny. It’s footprint is the same as 3 AA batteries. You can plug it into headphones and it sounds awesome. The real power of Kastle is its tiny patch cables, like patching any other modular but on a very small scale. It’s tiny patching capability gives it enormous power and verstility, but much more importantly it makes it loads of fun and that’s what’s really attracted me to it.
So let’s find out a bit more about what Kastle is from the Bastl Instruments site:
Kastle is a mini modular synthesizer with headphone output, 2 in/out ports for interfacing other gear and it runs on just 3 AA batteries. It is DIY friendly and ideal for beginners in modular synthesis, but it will add quite some unique functionality to any modular synthesizer systems. It delivers the fun of modular synthesis at cost and fits into your pocket so you can play it everywhere!
It has unique digital lo-fi sound and it can be melodic as well as very noisy and drony, soft or harsh. It is designed to be fun on its own but it is most powerful when combined with other modular gear.
Kastle is an open source DIY project which runs on two Attiny 85 chips that can be reprogrammed with an Arduino (google: “programming Attiny 85 with Arduino”). One chip is dedicated to sound generation while the other handles modulation. Several firmwares for the Attiny chips are available.
The Synth version combines complex oscillator and LFO with stepped waveform generator.
The oscillator section has 3 sound parameters pitch, timbre and waveshape – all under voltage control and with 3 different synthesis modes. It has a main output and a square wave output. Both can be used independently or combined. The 3 synthesis modes are phase distortion, phase modulation (also known as FM) and track & hold modulation. Each mode utilizes two oscillators. The Pitch controls the main oscillator, the Timbre sets the pitch of the modulating oscillator and the waveshape depends on the synthesis mode. The waveshape also controls the pulse width of the square wave output from the main oscillator.
The voltage controllable LFO has a triangle and square output and a reset input. The stepped waveform generator is inspired by the Rungler circuit by Rob Hordijk. It can produce 8 different voltages either in random order or in 8 or 16 step looping patterns depending on how the BIT IN is patched.
Here are the main features of the Kastle:
From using the Kastle for a couple of weeks now I can safely say that it fantastic and enormous fun to play with and experiment with. I’d highly recommend it to anyone.
If you want more information about the Kastle you should check out the Bastl Instruments site, and you buy one right here.
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