Going with the Grain

Oct 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Dennis Miller

           
 

TEN GRANULAR-SYNTHESIS PROGRAMS TO SLICE AND DICE YOUR SOUNDS

If you're interested in some serious sound-altering resources, the CDP library is unique in the range and quality of its offerings. Though you can buy GrainMill by itself, you might consider purchasing the entire tool set for not a whole lot more money (site licenses and student discounts are available).

Karlheinz Essl's REplay PLAYer 3.2 (Mac, $25)

Karlheinz Essl has been quietly producing creative music tools for years, and REplay PLAYer is just one of his many offerings. The program's interface is divided into four main areas: Mode, Grains, Pitch, and Scratch, with additional functions provided via pull-down menus (see Fig. 4). After you load a sample and turn on the audio engine, REplay will begin to generate grains from the source based on its default settings. You can use the Mode menu to choose how the sample will be scanned; options include scrubbing manually, Jump, which skips around in the file using distances you specify, and Loop, which has an adjustable speed setting (from 10 to 100 percent of the original speed).

Move to the Grains menu, and you'll find a 2-D grid for adjusting granularity (grain size) on the x axis and density on the y. Mouse movements that you make update parameters quickly and feel fluid with nary a glitch, but you can select from one of several presets if you prefer to leave control to the program. Pick the Random preset, for example, and you'll get a constantly changing grain cloud.

The Pitch area provides four ways to control grain pitch, which also include using presets and using sliders for adjusting pitch manually. There's also a virtual keyboard for specifying a transposition up or down two octaves and the ability to set a minimum and maximum range from which the program will pick randomly.

REplay has a feature that lets you crossfade between the original sound and the granulated version (with a random crossing amount, of course), the ability to host up to three VST plug-ins, EQ (also with a random option), and a random panning feature. All in all, it's a hefty toolkit for producing a wide variety of granular sounds.

Nicolas Fournel's Granulator 1.1 (Win, free)

Granulator offers just enough parameters to get your grain clouds flowing and could be a good entry point for exploring granulation of sample files. The ability to control every parameter via MIDI CC messages makes it suitable for a live environment and also allows a lot of spontaneity in a studio setting (though a plug-in version would be a huge enhancement in that environment; see Web Clip 5).

Among the different options are controls for grain density and duration, each of which offers a knob for setting a base value and another for random offset from the base. The same pair of controls is available to adjust the grain's pitch and the start point within the sample from which grains will be extracted. A filter with cutoff and resonance settings and an AR envelope with random offsets add to your sound-design options, and a delay with length and feedback controls and a final output stage with gain and pan settings round out the interface. You can also save presets of your settings and adjust the program's color scheme to suit your liking.

Tom Gersic's Atomic Cloud 1.0 (Win, $9.99)

Atomic Cloud's simple and intuitive interface places all the program's parameters onto a single screen (see Fig. 5). The software provides sliders for grain rate, grain size, scan rate, buffer rate, jitter, and amp level. There are also controls for setting the start and end points in the sample where grains will be generated. It's easy to produce effects with a high degree of randomness — a high Jitter value will serve nicely for that purpose — and you can produce backward-sounding grain clouds by setting the End parameter to a value lower than the Start value (see Web Clip 6).

Grain pitch is controlled by the Buffer Rate parameter, which offers a range of 0 to 100 (50 represents the original pitch). Scan Rate, in conjunction with Jitter, controls the rate at which the sample is scanned. Set it to 0 if you want to freeze the sound on a minute portion of your source file.

Atomic Cloud supports both 16- and 24-bit WAV output and offers a buffer-size setting that you can use to configure it for best performance on your system. The program comes with a small number of presets that illustrate several nice effects, and you can create and save your own.

Nikola Jeremic's Organik 1.2 (Win, free)

Organik is the only program in this roundup that can't granulate samples, but it offers plenty of sound-generating options nonetheless. Its single screen includes tabs to access parameters for its four synthetic-grain Generators, each of which can use one of the included waveform presets or employ an additive waveform that you design (see Web Clip 7). To start a project, you set a base grain size and grain rate for one or more of the Generators, then dial in some amount of random variation to those rates. (Note that you can enter values manually that exceed the values you can enter using the sliders.) You then trigger a note using either the onscreen keyboard or an external MIDI controller. You can modify the amount of randomness that will be added to the base pitch you play, or transpose the base pitch using the Octaves, Note, and Fine settings. All changes you make take effect in real time.