Beads

Texture synthesizer / granular processor (discontinued)

Beads is a 14HP Eurorack granular texture processor designed by Émilie Gillet and sold by Mutable Instruments from 2021 to 2022, as the successor to Clouds. It records incoming stereo audio into a buffer and plays back grains from it, with a delay mode, a reverb and a built-in wavetable synth for self-play. The module uses an STM32H743 at 480 MHz and a PCM3060 codec.

Platform

STM32H7

Manufacturer

pichenettes.github.io

Community

Mutable Instruments third-party firmware list

Related

Clouds

Front panel of the Mutable Instruments Beads Eurorack module — Photo: Mutable Instruments, manufacturer product image, via pichenettes.github.io

Notes

Mutable Instruments firmware is MIT-licensed (STM32 code) and the hardware is CC-BY-SA-3.0. Derivatives may not use the Mutable Instruments name. The official audio update is flashed through the module's own bootloader, and recalibration data lives in a settings sector that a recovery flash can overwrite.

Firmware 1

Drizzlet

Alpha community build of the released Beads source. Fixes a frozen-delay crash and half-written frozen-buffer saves, and adds an options page with an output limiter setting, a self-play mode and an optional monophonic grain mode.

by Insolent Construct

ActiveSource: openMIT

Distribution: Prebuilt image you flash yourself
Requires stock: Official Beads firmware (the 2021 release was the tested baseline)

Brick risk. Flashing this carries a known, documented risk of damaging the device.

granular
fx
bugfixes

Drizzlet version history
Version	Date	Notes
drizzlet-2026.10.14	2026-10-15	Alpha. Adds the output limiter option and fixes the frozen-delay crash and half-written frozen-buffer saves.
beads-2026.10.11	2026-10-12	First build, made from the released Beads source without changes.