“Perhaps the best tool ever created for producers of soundtracks and ambient music”: Beetlecrab Tempera review€670, beetlecrab.audio
I get to see so much cool music-making and sound-wrangling gear here at MusicTech that it can feel like I’ve seen it all. Not that I’m jaded, mind you — I’m regularly impressed, often delighted, and occasionally blown away. It’s just that surprises are more rare.

READ MORE: Beetlecrab Tempera: “As soon as we placed our hand on the grid and played a chord, we knew immediately, ‘Okay, this is it’”

Huge kudos must therefore go to Prague-based Beetlecrab for reminding me what it’s like to be hit with simultaneous doses of “wha..?” and “wow!”

What is Tempera?
At its heart, the compact and solidly built Tempera is a sampler, so the unit’s eight-by-eight grid of pads, four rotary encoders and assorted buttons don’t look out of place. But hang on a moment! Contrary to expectations, those touch-sensitive pads are not trigger pads like those found on MPC-style samplers or MIDI pad controllers.
Instead, each column of the grid hosts an audio sample, and each pad (or cell) within a column represents 1/8th of that sample. Touching or swiping across a cell causes it to light up, either momentarily whilst being touched or via various latching options, and when a note is played into the instrument the sample segments associated with any lit cells will sound.

Touching the grid to change the cells that are lit modifies the sound in real-time, making for a delightfully tactile and accessible experience that’s unlike anything else. But what you actually hear, and the colour of a cell’s lighting, is determined by which of the four colour-coded ‘Emitters’ is active when the cell is touched.
What is an Emitter?
An Emitter is, in essence, a granular synth engine that derives its grains from the audio contained within all cells lit in that Emitter’s colour. (A quick recap: granular synths loop and layer snippets of audio data, referred to as grains, to create constant or repeating sounds.)
The Emitter specifies the size of the grain, from just a fraction of a cell’s length, through the entirety of the cell, and up to the whole sample loaded into a column. In this way, Emitters can produce static pitched notes, shifting textures, or loops and beats (depending on the source sample).

Emitters can also pull in sample data from other cells in the X and Y dimensions on the grid, either via an offset or via a pair of ‘Spray’ parameters that cause additional cells to be triggered along with the selected cells.
Offsets and spray values can produce particularly striking results, especially when bringing in grains taken from different columns within the grid. This has been made even more flexible in the v2.1 firmware released just before this review was published, with an Emitter’s X offset now crossfading between different columns and samples where previously it would snap to one column/sample or another.
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
What is a Canvas?
A Tempera patch is referred to as a Canvas and incorporates all samples, Emitter settings, and the status of the grid cells at the time the Canvas was saved. The Canvas also includes additional sound processing stages.
A set of 10 modulation slots is provided, each with a choice of simple attack/decay or attack/release envelope, various LFO shapes, noise-based randomisation, and real-time input from the modulation wheel and aftertouch. The most recent firmware adds keyboard tracking and velocity to these available sources. Each modulator can only be mapped to a single destination, unfortunately, but this can be practically any Canvas- or Emitter-level parameter. With 10 modulators available, you’re unlikely to run out of options.
Similarly, each of the eight Macro slots, which are controlled via the unit’s rotary encoders when in Macro mode, can only drive a single parameter. This feels a bit restrictive – macros tend to be at their best when controlling multiple parameters simultaneously – but it does allow specific parameters to be made easily accessible for real-time performance control.
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
Another duty of the rotary encoders is to set the volume of each Emitter. The mixed signal is then fed through a multi-mode resonant filter, offering low-pass, band-pass, high-pass and formant filter models. The v2.1 firmware adds keyboard tracking to the filter’s cutoff frequency, the ability to choose which Emitters are routed via the filter, and a new Rake filter model. This is similar to a comb filter, and features amplitude modulation when the filter emphasis is turned up above 0.5, resulting in exceptionally interesting resonances.
The signal then flows to an ADSR amplitude envelope triggered by the notes played into Tempera. Meanwhile, individual Emitters have fade up and down parameters to shape the volume of grains, and the v2.1 update adds the option to apply a fast attack to the first grain that’s triggered, allowing an Emitter to react quickly to a played note whilst also creating smooth-sounding grains.
Finally, there’s a Canvas-wide effects chain consisting of chorus, delay and reverb (with the latter two having been enhanced and improved in the new firmware). Each Emitter has its own send level into the chain, although per-effect sends from each Emitter would have been preferable. Hopefully, we’ll see this in a future firmware update.

Sampling with Tempera
Creating custom Canvases is relatively straightforward. Samples are recorded (or imported) directly into a column and can be resampled from the unit itself, or be taken from a line or mic signal connected to the unit’s balanced jack input. There’s also a built-in mic for instant sound capture. It’s not the best quality, yet incredibly convenient.
My only complaint here is that any one sample is limited to just over 11 seconds in length. This is ample for creating textures and pitched sounds but is a definite drawback when designing samples to use as rhythmic or musical loops.

Recording samples involves placing one of Tempera’s columns into a record-enabled mode, and the v2.1 firmware has added an intriguing new feature here: the ability to use the record-enabled track as a real-time effects processor. When you do this, rather than the cells moving across the audio, the audio moves across the cells, whilst the Emitters continue to do what they do. If you are already struggling to grasp Tempera’s concept, then this will make you want to hide in a corner with a blanket over your head!
The results of this real-time processing are best suited to rhythmic effects, and so rely heavily on Tempera’s MIDI clock being synced to the incoming audio. They’re somewhat unusual and unpredictable too. It certainly plays to Beetlecrab’s penchant for the experimental and is a fascinating sound effect in its own right, but the jury’s still out on how useful or usable it actually is.
Tempera has 8GB of internal storage, some of which is used for the firmware and for preset Canvases and samples, but the vast majority is available for storing your own creations. Additional storage can be added via a micro SD slot, or by connecting a USB stick to the USB Host port.
The Host port can be used to connect USB-equipped keyboards and controllers, although standard MIDI in and out is also supported via mini-jacks. If you have no controller to hand, part of Tempera’s grid can be set to act as note triggers, although this then limits the area in which you can interact with the Emitters.
An additional USB Device port allows Tempera to connect to a computer, where it appears as a MIDI source and destination. When connected in this way, the unit can be switched to USB Bridge mode, allowing the computer to read and write directly to Tempera’s micro SD card.
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
What is Tempera like to use?
Tempera is enormously engaging and satisfying from the get-go, its inviting touch-pads making it astonishingly easy to start exploring fascinating noises with barely any introduction to the hardware.
Beetlecrab’s ingenious user interface plays a big part in its accessibility. The combination of colour-coding, rotary encoders, mini displays and mode buttons have been implemented in such an elegantly intuitive way that you find yourself dancing effortlessly around the instrument in no time.
Admittedly, it takes more effort to fully get your head around what Tempera is actually doing and how to fully exploit its abilities and idiosyncrasies. But hey, that’s half the fun of it!
Like all granular synths, Tempera is well suited to creating evolving sonic textures and soundscapes. This ability is supercharged by its interactive tactility, not to mention the astonishing sonic flourishes and details that can emerge from exploratory touches and swipes.
Put simply, Tempera could be the best tool ever created for producers of soundtracks and ambient music.
However, this is not the only instrument that is suited to this. With the right samples loaded, and the Emitters configured appropriately, Tempera can be an expressive lead synth, an emotive pad machine, or the maddest loop-and-rhythm box you ever laid hands on.
Being so open-ended does mean that, no matter how familiar you are with Tempera itself, you have to invest time in exploring the Canvases you wish to use, learning their particular abilities and nuances. Thankfully, doing this is a lot of fun.
Tempera will be fascinating to anybody interested in synthesis or sound design, but there’ll be fewer for whom it will have a tangible practical application. At a lesser price, this may not have mattered, but at €670 Tempera is not exactly a toy.
What it is, though, is an amazing, unique, quirky and endlessly engaging machine, and I absolutely love it.

Key features

16-voice polyphony
4 rotary encoders with colour-coded rings
8-by-8 grid of touch-sensitive pads
Colour-coding fully customisable
4 high-resolution displays
8GB internal storage
Micro SD slot
USB Host port for USB sticks, keyboards and controllers
USB Device port for connection to computer
Stereo line/headphone out (headphone jack uses the left-hand jack socket)
Stereo sampling line input via a single TRS jack
Built-in mic
Optional live grain processing of incoming audio
MIDI in/out via TRS mini-jack
ARM Cortex A72 quad core processor
32-bit internal processing
VESA mounting holes on rear panel

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