Beads has a special mode with its own wavetable banks, so you can use it as a granural synth basically. Although, if you know how to play with feedback well, you don’t really need to feed it too meaningful of a material to get gnarly sounds out of it. In addition, you can feed standard line level signals into Beads, which means that it’s compatible with virtually any audio device.

Yes, I’ve been into VCV rack and Cardinal for a while. My primary use case is idea/sample generation and it’s spectacular for that.

Maybe once I learn the sequencers I’ll make whole tracks in it.

By the way, you should not be afraid of modular hardware. Get a versatile effects module (for me, Mutable Instruments Beads) and use it as an effects processor.

I tried to get into IRC, but it lacked a lot of things that are basic nowadays, such as the ability to view past history of the chat and embedding media. I didn’t want to sit around for hours just to see what people would write about.