Skillweegee, I'm not certain which parts you don't understand? Think of both the Materials Lab and the DTE as mixers. The Materials Lab mixes your channels, A through D, through a series of rendering options (Diffusion, Ambience, Reflection, etc.) The DTE merely mixes the channels themselves for Procedural (fractal) Textures, as opposed to image-based textures (like photos, for example), which do not go through the DTE at all. In the DTE there are three separate channels. The mixing modes determine how they react together to achieve the "Result", which is the bottom image. Filters determine how the math involved reacts to ITSELF, and phase does the same thing only in a different way. Filter and Phase options only affect that particular channel, although these changes will echo through your mixing modes (Multiply, Add, Subtract, Blend Slope), etc. Ask away, I don't pretend to be THE texturing master, but both the Mat Lab and the DTE are far from strangers to me...