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