Beads - Magpie black panel

Texture synthesizer

Realtime granular processor with built-in CV-controlled random modulations.

A reinvention of Mutable Instruments Clouds, with hardware and software redesigned from the ground up, free of modes and bloat.

Audio acquisition

Stereo I/O with automatic level detection.
Manual override of the level detection.
Automatic mono/stereo switching through patch cable detection.
Recording time: 4s (48kHz 16-bit, stereo) to 32s (24kHz µ-law, mono).
Four quality modes, with different tone and reverb characters:

    48kHz 16-bit
    32kHz 12-bit with Clouds emulation
    24kHz 12-bit with a hi-fi dry signal path
    24kHz µ-law with cassette emulation
The FREEZE button and the gate input freezes the content of the recording buffer, allowing you to dive into its sonic details.
Auto-saving of the FREEZE buffer.

Granular synthesis

Three grain generation modes:

Latched (continuous), with a periodic or randomized rate, tracking V/O.
Gated, with bursts of grains triggered by the press of the SEED button or an external gate.
Clocked, with randomization or division of an external clock or trigger signal.

Four grain parameters:

TIME. Temporal position within the buffer.
SIZE. Grain duration from 0.03 to 4 seconds, forward or backward playback.
SHAPE. Morphing between four key shapes of the grain envelope: solid rectangular, snappy decay, smooth bell, or reversed.
PITCH. With V/O tracking.

Attenurandomizers

Available for each of the four parameters of a grain, sampled each time a grain is started:

Direct CV control.
CV control of the amount of gaussian randomization.
Internal randomization with an independent, uniform or peaky, random source.

Delay

Control of both the base delay clock rate (DENSITY), and its multiplication (TIME), with optional random taps.
Tap tempo with the SEED button or an external signal.
Enveloping of delay repeats, with the SHAPE setting.
Pitch shifting of the delayed signal, controlled by PITCH.

Signal flow

Feedback path delay: 1 sample.
Independent knobs for feedback, dry/wet amount, and reverb amount.
CV input assignable to each of these three parameters, or to variable combinations of them.
When unpatched, the R output is summed to the L output.
Optional generation of a gate signal on the R output.

Specifications

All inputs: 100k impedance.
Audio codec: 24kHz, 32kHz or 48kHz, 24-bit.
16-bit CV capture.
Processing rate: audio-rate for the SEED and FREEZE inputs, 4kHz for the CV inputs.
Latency: 0.25ms.
CV input range: +/- 8V for grain parameters, +/- 5V for density (with V/O tracking) and assignable CV.
Internal processing: 32-bit floating point.

http://mutable-instruments.net/modules/beads