Mutable Instruments today introduced Beads, described as the ‘reinvention’ of the popular Clouds Eurorack ‘texture synthesizer’.
The new module is redeisgned from the ground up to provide a broader sound palette, more control, better playability, and direct access to new features.
Beads’ improved specifications allow for higher audio quality, a longer buffer, the use of better interpolation and anti-aliasing algorithms, and for key DSP blocks to run at a faster rate.
Granular processing can also now go into new territory, such as formants, wavetables, hard-sync-like sounds, or crispy noise.
Here’s what else is new:
- Parameter response to the turn of a knob or a CV modulation bas been refined, with new possibilities such as reverse playback or percussive envelopes.
Control – To trigger or schedule grains, Beads provides new features to divide or randomize an external clock or trigger stream, spray bursts of grains in response to a gate, or get the grain rate to track a V/O CV or the frequency of an external oscillator. - Chaos – Each key parameter of a grain comes with its own ‘attenurandomizer’, which allows direct CV control, CV control of the randomization (spread) of this parameter, or internal randomization using some of Marbles’ algorithms.
- Character – Beads provides four audio quality settings, which go well beyond buffer sample rate and bit-depth: they affect the clock of the converters, the amplitude limiting and saturation of the signal path, the tone of the reverb, and additional media-emulation effects.
- Beads can operate as a delay without the need to switch to a different mode: just ask it to play a never-ending grain. Its DENSITY, TIME and SEED controls are repurposed to allow various features such as tap-tempo, beat slicing, time-stretching, or comb-filtering at rates tracking V/O.
- Without any audio input, Beads will granularize 8 internal banks of wavetables.
- All parameters have a dedicated knob.
Here are some hands-on demos of the Mutable Instruments’ Beads Eurorack module:
Pricing and Availability
The Mutable Instruments Beads is priced at €299 / $359 USD. See the MI site for details.
Videos via midcentury modular, Tom Leclerc and Robin Rimbaud
Looking forward to the Divkid video on this. So far, looks like a great update!
I’m loving it! I have Marbles, Elements, and Tides! Love Mutable instruments modules!! Swiss Army knives of the Eurorack!
Beads aren’t cheap
Are beads cheap?
For all you kink fans
Cool. Looking forward to the expanded Japamala in future.
Don’t like the small pot for dry/wet control. But overall this is a hit) What I don’t get yet is if it makes Clouds obsolete, i.e. surpasses it in all ways.
In my opinion it does. I loved my Clouds before I sold it, but my biggest gripe was it’s somewhat lo-fi audio quality. The new demos of Beads sound much clearer to me.
I hear you. That’s the reason why I never had it in hardware.
Looking forward to Beads, but sad it will be the last module from MI. She has been very vocal about that.
Whaaatt really? They should do what they need to but they make thr most inventive modules by far.
Thankfully there was Scanner’s demo…