Beetlecrab’s Tempera isn’t your typical musical instrument. It’s not even your typical synthesizer. It started life as a university project: an A4 piece of paper with a dozen reels of cassette tape stuck to it, which could be ‘played’ with two hacked-up tape heads.
Scrubbing across the tape with the tape head would play back tiny samples of the audio, like a tactile, analogue version of a granular synthesizer. Getting any coherent musical ideas out of it was near-impossible, though, admits its creator and Beetlecrab co-founder, Andre Sklenar. It was essentially only useful for “artsy stuff” and as an ambient soundscape machine (which is still pretty cool, honestly).
Sklenar and his business partner, Adam Heinrich, revisited this academic adventure shortly after releasing their first synth, Vector, in 2021. With its hybrid synth engine and workflow centred around an ‘Orbiter’, Beetlecrab’s debut product was intentionally experimental. Tempera builds on Vector’s idiosyncracy; this granular synth won’t let you play notes or chop samples in the way you’re accustomed to — it forces you to get hands-on and explore sound in unfamiliar ways.
“The interface and the capabilities of a synthesizer largely determine the musical result,” says Sklenar. ”So we tried to make the interface substantially different, to break this comfort zone; just blow it away so it’s just not there anymore and you’re forced to get out of your automatic thinking.” From th.
