The Seiko DS250 is the strange and extremely rare additive synthesizer of the 1980s used by J. M. Jarre in his Rendezvous album. The DS250 has a built-in set of presets, and it allows you to add two presets by pressing the double softkey to select layer 1 and layer 2; it’s a little awkward to press these buttons, so in our version there are only two sets of 16 preset selection buttons, which is much easier.
The D-250 builds on some form of additive synthesis to create its own sound and produces tones that are not pure and untouched, but instead have a beautiful earthy, organic and grainy sound that has characteristic features.
After many years of searching for one of these ghostly keyboards, I was immediately struck by her magnificent selection of presets, but I thought that she was let down due to her lack of speed sensitivity – so this was the first thing we added to the Castle Instruments version. I also thought that this could benefit from resonant filters, so we added them and also added speed modulation to allow us to control filter clipping and resonance; it really added so much expression to the sounds. We also added several types of filters that can be selected in the interface filter menu.
We also added managed ADSRs for amplifier and filter, Hi-Pass filters, and synchronized MIDI LFOs; all these additional functions take sounds far beyond what can only be achieved with hardware synthesis. Of course, our version has the original sounds from the hardware DS-250, and we created factory presets for you in the preset folder, but it’s great to be able to go beyond the hardware capabilities and explore new sounds – for example, if Seiko added all of these New features in their original equipment.
Our version also has two random patch generators – one for each predefined layer, which makes it easy to apply the chaos theory in creating a patch and just click randomly until you get what you like.
There is also a section with full effects, including: Chorus, Phaser, Flanger, tape saturation / heat, reverb, MIDI sync delays and arpeggiator.
Castle Instruments DS-2500 is perfect for setting off into the strange and digital world of additive sounds and textures, the roots of which are firmly connected to the original sounds of the DS-250 equipment and equipped with 100 presets and 30 MULTI to get started.
• 110 Presets
• 30 Multis
• Randomization System
• 2 Layers (16 Voices per Layer)
• 41 Filters with LFO
• Arpeggiator
• 7 Global Effects
• Convolution Reverbs