Beetlecrab Tempera

Beetlecrab introduce their own distinctive take on granular synthesis.

Believe it or not, it’s surprisingly difficult to pin down Beetlecrab, the Prague‑based developers behind the Tempera. For one thing, the company have given each of their two available instruments, the Vector and the Tempera, its own website and even its own contact email address, with the landing page of the company website proper simply guiding users to either of the above. “Another thing we’re slowly dealing with is the inscrutable situation about our branding,” reveals a candid blog post from August 2023. “It’s a mess. To get out of all this confusion we decided to adopt an umbrella for both existing and new upcoming projects: beetlecrab.audio. We couldn’t quite figure out a suitable name but many of you started using this, so let’s go with it.” Such an unfussy and atomised approach is refreshing. Clearly the Beetlecrab crew are far more concerned with creating instruments whose value is based on merit alone and not on brand recognition or the success of other units in their range (which, in fairness, is a very small range). No slathering of the company insignia across the audience‑facing panel here; indeed, the developer’s name isn’t inscribed anywhere on the chassis of the Tempera. As far as I can tell, they have no logo of any kind.

In a line‑up, the Tempera would look very much at home next to the likes of the Ableton Push, Polyend Play and OXI ONE, but its similarities with these units more or less end there. A standalone polyphonic granular synthesizer, its grid isn’t principally a control interface or a sequencer — it has no sequencer at all, in fact — instead, in many ways, it has more in common with a tape machine than it does with other digital hardware. Across the top of the unit are four encoders, which represent four ‘emitters’ with four different colours. Each of these emitters is essentially a standalone granular synthesis engine, complete with its own volume, behaviour, modulation, effects and more. I daresay — and this will make more sense in due course, so read on — that even one of these emitters would be enough to render the Tempera an impressive instrument, let alone four.

Cellular Network

The other central component to the Tempera’s workflow is its 8x8 grid of light‑up cells. This is best thought of as a sound bank to be accessed with the four granular engines. Each vertical column of eight cells, or track, represents an audio file with the playback direction going from top to bottom. Select an emitter — blue, pink, yellow or green — and touch a cell to illuminate it in that colour. Play a note, and that emitter will output that particular cell’s worth of audio according to the settings of its granular engine, which cover pretty much all the things we love about granular synthesis: grain time, grain density, jitter, tuning variance and so on. You can set the behaviour of the emitter to toggle on and off, latch or instantly disengage upon release (‘Instant’). The latter means you can hold a note and draw your finger back and forth through the audio file to generate some incredibly expressive and flexible granular goodness — already far more spontaneous and expressive than you’ll find in most synths of the Tempera’s type.

But here’s where things get interesting. As well as drawing a finger up or down through one audio file, you can of course draw it left or right and into other tracks, pulling in audio from different samples whose equivalent cells will be played back with the same emitter settings. Things don’t stop there: I’m not going to simply list all the emitter parameters, but there are also settings for things like Spray, which momentarily scatters emitters across the grid from the centre of the initial cell — vertically, horizontally or both — residually triggering...