PORTALS and TAPS, New Nodes for Lunacy Audio BEam
Lunacy Audio have introduced two new nodes to their Beam multi effects eco system, partnering with Benn Jordan they have created Taps and Portals. Taps, like the other Beam nodes is also available as a standalone effects unit, however Portals is quite unique (and wouldn’t make sense as a standalone plugin. This brings the total effects count of Beam up to eight and marks a significant change in the power and utility of this plugin.
PORTALS
Portals acts as a feedback node system within Beam, giving you an input and an output node and allowing you to place any effects within this feedback loop. The feedback loop has a minimum delay time of 20 milliseconds and also comes with a built in gate to mitigate endless looping. Being able to create feedback loops within such a powerful multi effects eco system, you can load any of the existing nodes into the feedback loop as well as connect each end of the portal into different loops or signal paths.
The Portal delay time can also be locked to the tempo and used as a creative delay. For example, by setting parallel portals to different delay times, you can create your own 3 tap delay with unique effects on each tap.
TAPS
Taps is a creative multi-tap delay with up to eight taps and a variety of effects that can affect the delayed signals. When using multiple taps, you can do some fun tricks with the spacing controls to create interesting rhythms, panning, and volume fades. The “pitch” tab lets you set different values per tap, much like a step sequencer, for whichever “pitch mode” you have selected. Pitch modes include a wide and narrow BPF, a comb filter, a frequency shifter, and a tone generator. It’s worth noting that none of the pitch modes are pitch shifters.
with tempo sync deactivated you can get delay times as low as 0 ms with 0.01 second control resolution (10 ms). When used as a resonator in this way, you can get some fun effects with the pitch modes, especially the frequency shifter. There’s also some tape effects to round things out, wow and flutter add subtle speed variation. Dust is a layer of crackles and noise, and drop randomly cuts the signal of various taps.
These two new nodes add so much to Beam and make it feel much more fleshed out compared to the day one release. I find my patches grow larger and more complex with each addition, and starting out with the bare minimum forced me to make use of every module possible. Now I have quite a bit more freedom while designing Beam patches. I can’t wait to see what they add next, in my opinion, mode modulation would go a LONG ways, I’d also love to see a multi-band splitter and/or a frequency shifter.
You can pick up BEAM here: https://bit.ly/4hQW1Co