Introduction

Tempera is a multi-sample, 16-voice polyphonic granular synthesizer.

You can think of it as eight parallel stereo tape tracks, laid in columns next to each other, forming a kind of two-dimensional tape surface. Your fingers act as generators (known as Emitters) for one or many tape heads (referred to as Grains) riding across the audio surface.

This main control interface – the touchgrid – is a fully polyphonic touch sensitive surface on which emitters are laid, which in turn produce streams of grains.

Tempera can be many things: a percussive drum bed, a pad station, sampler, granular cloud generator, an ambient machine, remix and sample-chopping instrument, recorder, an accompaniment to other instruments, a procedural composition tool, a sample wrangler, a tempo-synced live grain FX processor, an in-the-box resampler.

Above all, it can be the companion to wherever your music takes you.

This manual will walk you through Tempera’s various functions and how to use them, as well as some tips and answers to frequently asked questions.