Vector Synth has announced that Tempera, a new granular instrument, is now available to pre-order.
Tempera is a tactile, cross-sample granular synthesizer and resampler with a unique interface and approach to sound manipulation. The developers describe it as “a novel instrument”, designed for live performance, sound design, sound recording and manipulation, soundscapes, looping, sample triggering and more.
Tempera is a compact instrument in a coarse-grain powder coated metal chassis, with 4 RBG backlit encoders with anodized aluminum knobs, and 4 128×64 monochrome OLED displays. The touchgrid is an in-house developed sensor grid with a vibrant RGB backlight under each cell.
Tempera has a global grain pool of over 4000 stereo grains, freely allocated to a 16-voice polyphony. Each voice has capacity for 64 concurrently playing emitters of 4 configurations, a multimode filter, and 5 assignable LFO or envelope modulators. The instrument has a built-in reverb, and additional effects are planned.
The layout of the 8×8 touch grid – the canvas – represents 8 stereo samples in vertical columns. When a finger is placed somewhere on the canvas, an emitter is created under the finger and grain playback begins. The placed emitters will generate grains from nearby audio, with brush width, height, movement, size, density and other parameters. The parameters can also be assigned as modulation destinations.
When another voice is added from a MIDI controller or the onboard virtual keyboard, the whole stack of grain-generating emitters is duplicated for the new voice.
The samples can be loaded from the internal memory of 8GB, from an SD card or a USB thumbdrive. Many audio formats are supported, and it is recommended to use WAV or FLAC.
It is also possible to record a sample directly into Tempera. This can be done either through the stereo audio input, which supports instrument input, dynamic microphone or line in, or live sampling “record what you play”. This can be done repeatedly back and forth. A built-in microphone is also present for quick sketching.
Further connectivity includes 6.3mm stereo headphone output, and main output mono left and right, USB host, USB device, MIDI input and output on TRS.
Pricing and Availability:
Tempera is available now to pre-order, with an intro price of 642€ through May 26th, 2023.
What a lovely thing. The addition of a onboard mic is brilliant. Wish every device that offers sampling included one.
Looks great- I cant justify one as I have Borderlands on IOS which is similar, but there isn’t much like this in hardware and it sounds amazing and looks very cool.
im with yah haha. Borderlands + samplr on ios. still tempted to snag this tho. having a dedicated granular would be great, + all granulars have their own little things that make them unique. I’ll be keeping an eye out for used in a year or two. I feel like granulars are one of those things people either love or hate, and many will buy, use it twice and then sell to make way for something else.
it is pretty amazing but considering I have the texturelab coming and there will be the new FW coming for the microfreak I will have my granular bases covered for a bit – I do love the expressiveness of this though
For the price and traditional sequencer layout the Texturelab seems like the better option
But it’s a shame the sampling is mono
Stereo samples through granular certainly widens the palette of possibilities
I may be mistaken, but I believe there is both a mono and stereo input, so the sampling could be in stereo too.
The Texture Lab can only sample in mono.
There is a stereo line in, but that is for running outboard gear through it’s reverb and using it as a effect unit.
Samples in mono only.
got it, thank you for clarifying!
they are all kind of different – but I already have a microfreak so that is just a freebee and the texture lab is inexpensive and can be used as a granular effect so I see it as a different option rather than a better or worse option
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Wow €790 inclusive of VAT
That’s quite a hefty price tag