In this video, synthesist Ben Wilson, aka DivKid, offers an in-depth introduction to the Mutable Instruments Beads.
The Mutable Instruments Beads is designed to be a ‘reinvention’ of their popular Clouds Eurorack ‘texture synthesizer’, offering higher audio quality and improved ease-of-use.
“In this video, I’ll be taking you through all the settings and controls with technical run downs, raw sounds and LOTS of musical patches and applications,” notes Wilson. “I always aim to pack demos full of ideas and use cases both technically and musically, so I hope you enjoy the video and learn a few things.”
Topics covered:
00:00 Hello and patch previews
02:21 Verbal and graphical run down of Beads and how granular synthesis works
05:41 My Beads Patch Cookbook PDF
06:07 Patch Break – Rings into Beads & VERB BLISS
DENSITY & SEEDING GRAINS OF AUDIO
06:32 Latched density – auto grain creation
08:31 Clocked density – dividers and probability
09:33 Gated & Triggered density & turning Beads into a voice
10:55 Patch Break – Fuzzy bass guitar with scattered granular animations
ATTENURANDOMISER
11:24 Internal modulations
12:44 Random modulation as the key to granular synthesis sounds
13:08 External modulations
14:42 Patch Break – Particles of the speech in 12 bit ‘classic Clouds’ mode
15:01 Parameters snapshot for each grain + polyphonic chordal washes
16:03 Patch Break – modulated dry/wet for fading octave particles
16:22 Sound design tip – Synthesising debris from basic impacts
17:12 Patch break – Lo Fi Modular Beats to relax and study to
17:40 Quality settings and their media emulations (hi fi, lo fi, tape emulation)
18:33 Reverb – it’s sound and quality changes
20:04 Sound design tip for cinematic evolving drones
20:21 Patch Break – Ambient guitar with pitch shifting trails
21:47 Making one VCO sound massive with granular top line melodies
23:13 WHAT A BONUS! – WAVETABLE OSCILLATOR!!!
24:45 Patch Break – a pitched down poem about Clouds
DELAY MODE
25:05 How to get into delay mode
25:36 Standard delays
26:47 Multi-tap delays
27:21 Clocked delays
28:23 Quality settings & media emulating delays (tape)
29:17 Rotating head based pitch shifting & internal modulation of delays
29:47 Grungy lo fi ambient machine! Multi-tap saturated tape delays
30:28 Quick & dirty Karplus Strong Synthesis for plucked strings
31:33 Chorus & vibrato
32:39 Comb filter & flanger
33:29 Beat Slicer – think beat repeat, glitch, buffer stutters
35:13 Patch break – swelling grains from wavetables
35:37 Shimmer FX – granular echoes & shimmer verb
37:22 Patch break – Music concrète style sonic collages
37:43 How to time stretch with Beads
39:00 Patch Break – Beads as a multi-FX unit for external gear
39:19 Pitch shifting – quick tips for smooth settings
40:03 Patch break – Scattered percussion and glitch beat
40:25 Assignable CV input for feedback, reverb and mix
41:55 Patch break – guitar wow and flutter with UBER CHARACTER!
42:29 Gain adjustments
43:18 Bask in Beads by itself
I’m getting one of these to use with Elements! Great video by DivKid!!
Why is the buffer sample rate so short at higher quality? They couldn’t afford to buy a decent amount of RAM for a $360 piece of equipment?