Tempera Quirks and Foibles by Benge

video upload by Memetune Studio

"I’ve been exploring granular synthesis since around 1997, when Native Instruments brought out Reaktor, because it was the first system I knew of that had a granular synthesis engine built into it

But even before that I was experimenting with certain samplers that could do a sort of proto-granular thing where you could control the loop start and end end points of a sample independently, and use sliders to scroll through the sample by hand (for example on the Fairlight CMI 2X and also the Akai S612)

But nowadays we have it so easy, as there are a whole slew of desktop granular devices coming out, often based on ARM chips, such as the Tasty Chips GR units, the recent Waldorf synths, the Torso S4, Endorphines Evil Pet, not to mention the Mutable Instruments Clouds and its many derivatives

And then there's this little monster, The Beetlecrab Tempera - a strange and tiny box which takes granular synthesis and does something completely unique with it

It’s got 8 stereo granular samplers at its heart, but the way you interact with them is using the 8x8 touch-points. They are called emitters, and you play them either over midi or using some of the touch-points. You can change and trigger emitters in x - y directions, and it's all extremely complex, and things can get really wild very quickly, so as this is my first patch on it, I decided to keep it simple by using just 2 of the 8 grain samplers

I captured the samples myself using the built in mic (sample 1 is just tapping the box with my fingers, and sample 2 is me humming

It also has comprehensive mixing and FX processors, so here is a little ambient sketch done in real time, using just the Tempera

I’m going to have fun exploring this thing - especially when I integrate it into some of my modular systems, once I have got my head round its many quirks and foibles"