After a fantastic reception at SuperBooth23 in Berlin, we’re excited to open Tempera for preorders. The preorder can be made on our webpage: https://www.playtempera.com for an opening price of 642€ + VAT. Deliveries will begin in November. Shipping worldwide.

What is Tempera?

Tempera is a tactile, cross-sample granular synthesizer and resampler with a unique interface and approach to sound manipulation. It is a novel instrument intended for:

– live performance

– sound design

– percussive play

– sample recording and manipulation

– soundscapes and ambient

– film music

– polyphony

– looping

– sample triggering

– grain/slice sequencing

– sound experimentation

– sound exploration

Tempera is a compact instrument in a coarse-grain powder coated metal chassis, with 4 RBG backlit encoders with anodized aluminium knobs, and 4 128×64 monochrome OLED displays. The touchgrid is an in-house developed sensor grid with a vibrant RGB backlight under each cell. Tempera is hand-assembled in Prague, Czech Republic. The build quality is sturdy and precise.

Tempera has a global grain pool of over 4000 stereo grains, freely allocated to a 16-voice polyphony. Each voice has capacity for 64 concurrently playing emitters of 4 configurations, a multimode filter, and 5 assignable LFO or envelope modulators. The instrument has a built-in reverb, with a few more effects to be added.

The layout of the 8×8 touch grid – the canvas – represents 8 stereo samples in vertical columns. When a finger is placed somewhere on the canvas, an emitter is created under the finger and grain playback begins. The placed emitters will generate grains from nearby audio, with brush width, height, movement, size, density and other parameters. The parameters can also be assigned as modulation destinations.

When another voice is added from a MIDI controller or the onboard virtual keyboard, the whole stack of grain-generating emitters is duplicated for the new voice.

The samples can be loaded from the internal memory of 8GB, from an SD card or a USB thumbdrive. Many audio formats are supported, and it is recommended to use WAV or FLAC.

It is also possible to record a sample directly into Tempera. This can be done either through the stereo audio input, which supports instrument input, dynamic microphone or line in, or live sampling “record what you play”. This can be done repeatedly back and forth. A built-in microphone is also present for quick sketching.

Further connectivity includes 6.3mm stereo headphone output, and main output mono left and right, USB host, USB device, MIDI input and output on TRS.