Tempera Granular Instrument v1.5 Updated with New Features + Polish

 


Developers of Tempera – a tactile, cross-sample granular synthesizer and resampler – let us know that they’ve released firmware v1.5, an update that adds new features, along with ‘polishing’ and bugfixes.

 

What they shared about the most significant fixes in Tempera v1.5:

New per-emitter Tone filters

If you find that it’s easy to overwhelm your mix with all the grains and emitters, the new Tone filter is one way to deal with it. It consists of a stereo pair of 1-pole LP and HP filters and it has two parameters: Width and Center. It can work as a sweepable “DJ style” filter, or a smooth bandpass to give each emitter a place in the mix. Also it is a modulator destination! Big thanks for this goes to our Discord community who was key in finding a good way to do this in a way that’s useful and flowing with the rest of Tempera’s UI.

New modulator destinations

The v1.5 firmware adds a couple of of new modulator destinations: per-emmiter Volume, Grain size, Grain Density, and Tone. Over time we’ll keep adding more of these. Which parameters should be made modulatable in the next round?

Picking an audio slice from a long audio file

It is now possible to load a long audio file into Tempera (up to 5 minutes) and pick an up to 11s window from it to load into a Track. The new firmware also fixes some bugs with regard to audio file loading, and now supports various sample rates and bit depths.

Other things in a gist:

    • There’s now also a Random Name Generator to save time when saving canvases (no more AAAA.canvas!) Turtle Blues? Boring Sonata? It’s all in there!
    • Many new new global settings, like Velocity curve, Max volume, Audition volume, new recording mode Mix which blends half of old with half of new, adjustable Display brightness
    • Small things, like Round button + keyboard to show/hide the overlay keyboard, and a new Chromatic scale option
    • New Horizontal overlay keyboard variant

See the Tempera newsletter for details.

 

 

 

New Electronic Instrument, The Zen Flute, Now Available


Instrument designer Keith Baxter let us know that his latest design, the Zen Flute, is now available.

The Zen Flute is described as a “mouth theremin”, that maps the pressure and shape of a performer’s mouth to the pitch output. It provides USB and analog outputs of the on-board procedural flute synthesizer, along with USB MIDI for controlling other MIDI devices or software.

The instrument was First Prize winner in the 2023 Guthman Musical Instrument Competition, an annual invent that celebrates “innovative musical instruments at the intersection of musicality, design, and engineering”.

Features:

  • Housing: Solid color PVC with cast acrylic end panels (white or black)
  • Processor: Teensy 4.0 ARM Cortex-M7 at 600 MHz
  • Open Source software featuring the Faust procedural synthesizer from Grame Research Lab, France.
  • Outputs: analog stereo audio (right stereo jack), USB audio (digital stereo); USB MIDI, analog monophonic pitch monitor (left jack)
  • Cherry “red” fast action keyboard switches
  • Includes USB cable and mini-CD with schematic, source code, instructions and hints

An example of the Zen Flute in action:

The Zen Flute is available for $320.

 

 

Samplr 1.5 Adds MIDI Control to the iPad Multitouch Sampling Instrument


Developer Marcos Alonso has released Samplr 1.5, an update that adds MIDI control to the pioneering iPad multitouch sampling instrument.

An example of the update in action:


Features:

  • 8 play modes: Slicer, Looper, Bow, Tape, Scratch, Arpeggiator, Keyboard and Loop Player
  • Gesture recorder for sequencing
  • Audio input recording and resampling
  • 6 sample slots (x16 voices)
  • 5 effects per sample: Distortion, Filter, Amplitude Modulator, Feedback Delay and Reverb
  • Ableton Link
  • MIDI Keyboard, Controller and Sync input
  • IAA (Inter-App Audio)
  • Audiobus Input and Output
  • Dropbox import
  • Export to AudioShare
  • WAV and AIFF file support


Samplr is available now for $19.99.