Superbooth 23: Bastl Instruments intros Basil, a new flexible stereo delay able to travel from a lo-fi to a spacey ambient processor.
Superbooth 23 starts in a few hours. With over 200 developers, it’s the biggest edition so far. Covering everything will be very tough this year. But it’s a good thing that some developers have already announced their new products beforehand.
Just like Bastl Instruments the Basil, a new super flexible digital stereo delay module.
Bastl Instruments Basil
Basil is a new flexible digital stereo delay module built on the Bastl Pizza HW platform. According to the developers, it offers clean delays, lo-fi flavors up to space section, opening the doors for exploration far beyond simple delay territory.
It has an internal buffer that can be modulated. And this works so well, says Bastl, that you can archive classic time-based effects, such as chorus, flanger, vibrato, pitch shifter, reverb, and stereo widener. More, it is ideal for clean effects, ambient washes, glitchy sound design, or distorted drones, promises Bastl.
Basil also works as a Karplus-Strong synthesis voice. The built-in V/oct input, fine delay tuning, and filter in the feedback path make this possible. Plus, the feedback amount is compensated with the shortest delay times to maintain constant decay characteristics when changing pitch.
The delay has a maximum sample rate of 41.66 kHz, 16-bit. The max delay time in stereo is 0.5s, and in mono in the ping pong mode 1s.
Multi-Voice Delay
There are different flavors you activate on the front panel. Lo-Fi turns off the anti-aliasing filter for the lower sample rates. There is a freeze function that acts as a micro looper or ambient washes. The space section unlocks the world of reverb-like sounds. You can work here with blur, filter, and multi-taps for adding density.
Open-Source
Since Basil is based on the same 8HP HW platform as the Pizza oscillator, owners of either module can easily interchange their firmware using the simple firmware update procedure. That’s a big thing, in my opinion. So similar to what Noise Engineering is doing with their Versio series. However, Bastl will not be selling extra faceplates.
But they will open-source the production and factor files for all the modules based on the Bastl Pizza platform. They plan to open-source the code and the schematics of the module so that users can hack their own Pizzas. That’s super cool.
Connection side, the module has stereo inputs (left normalized to right) and stereo outputs. Further, it has V/oct input, sync input, an assignable CV with a dedicated knob, and more.
First Impression
At first glance a flexible stereo delay with many possibilities. Above all, the fact that it can range from lo-fi to spacey reverb makes it much more interesting than classic delays. Looking forward to more demos.
Bastl Instruments Basil is available now for $283/317,73€ from their website and retailers. Bastl is at Superbooth 23 at booth 0400
More information here: Bastl Instruments
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