The Bastl Instruments Kastle 2 Wave Bard at a glance

With the Kastle 2 Wave Bard, Bastl Instruments presents an experimental, patchable sampler. At first glance, you will find all the parameters typical of samplers, as you would expect from full-blown devices. The samples are organized in banks and can be selected, sequenced and manipulated using the knobs, the control voltages of the pattern generator and the LFO. The Wave Bard comes from the factory with six loaded banks, each containing eight samples. The samples are selected via knob or animated via control voltage. Custom samples, new patterns and even the scales for melodically quantized playback of the samples can be created with the web-based Wave Bard Sample Loader matching. The sample time is specified as 89 seconds in mono and 44 seconds in stereo at 16 bit / 44kHz. The effects section covers everything with filters, Delay and chorus/flanger, which is an advantage for the sounds in this rather experimental context. The highlight, however, is that you can use the patch cables to create interactions between functions that can hardly be realized with classic samplers. An envelope and the LFO with two waveforms also provide a lot of movement in the sound; even the option to play the selected sample backwards has been considered. The Wave Bard is wild and loves to play its own song, which you can fully influence.