Granular, sampler and looper modules

Clearly laid out front panel. It’s large but logical

I write a lot of reviews for Future Music magazine and musicradar.com with a lot of these being about new and upcoming modules. This means I’m really lucky in that I can play around with some very cool new tools and see how they fit into different workflows and patches etc.

I get excited by a lot of these but recently there have been two in particular that I’m more excited about than I have been for a while. This might be because I’m working on a new album with my partner in crime, Guy, and am at the stage of writing some more ambient piece, to serve as transitions between the other, more beat-based, tracks. Anyway, what’s got me excited is granular synthesis, looping and sampling. Not a new thing by any means and I love my Clouds and Arbhar modules to bits but it’s always nice to see developments in an area of interest.

First up, is the module you see above, the ADDAC 112, which is a voltage controlled sampler and looper. There are two things I like about this. First up is the split design. Having all the ports off to one side means the controls can be more clearly laid out and stay accessible. Yes, this makes for a larger module but that’s a compromise I’m happy to make. Secondly is that this thing has a 5 minute buffer! That’s pretty extraordinary and will mean new techniques can come into play, with results not seen before, at leastin this format.

Next is Mutable Instruments Beads, commonly thought as as Clouds 2.0. This has been talked about for months now and is sure to be a huge success. In fact I’m lucky to get one as Emilie told me yesterday that they have nearly sold out already. I’m really looking forward to this arriving and will be putting a lot of hours into learning it. I like the idea of the quality settings, although I see them more as flavours than quality. In reality I think the cv modulation of internal modulation will be the rock star feature of this module.

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