A Field Guide To Our Granular Plugins

Granular synthesis has been around in theory since the 1940s, when Dennis Gabor proposed it as a way to think about sound; in practice since the 1970s, when Iannis Xenakis and Curtis Roads worked out how to actually do it; and as a thing you could buy in a plugin window since roughly the mid-1990s, when computers got fast enough that doing it in real time stopped being a doctoral thesis and started being a feature checkbox.

A tl;dr overview: you take a perfectly fine piece of audio, chop it into pieces small enough that your ear can't perceive them as discrete events on their own, and then reassemble those pieces in some new arrangement of your choosing. This is, when you think about it,  a deeply weird thing to want to do. The fact that it produces some of the most beautiful sounds in the modern composer's toolkit is one of those happy accidents of computer music, like discovering that ring mod makes everything sound vaguely like Optimus Prime farting. 

We currently have three plugins that do granular things. Each one approaches the technique from a different angle, and which one you want depends on what you are trying to accomplish, and whether you want an instrument, an effect, or a delay that occasionally pretends to be both.

Quanta 2 is a granular synthesizer. That is to say, it is an instrument, not an effect. You drop a sample on it (any sample; AIFF, WAV, FLAC, MP3, or Ogg, at any sample rate, with the root note detected automatically) and Quanta 2 takes that sample apart and reassembles it on the fly into something you play with a MIDI controller. It generates up to 100 grains per voice, simultaneously, with control over every dimension of a grain you might want to control: rate, pitch, direction, shape, length, panning, source position, and level. There are also two virtual analog oscillators sitting alongside the grain engine, which is to say Quanta 2 is also a perfectly competent subtractive VA synth if you happen to need one of those.

The feature list is, if we're being honest, the kind of thing that requires a manual. Two multi-mode filters with two slopes each. Four FEGs (Flexible Envelope Generator), each of which is a 99-step arbitrary function generator that can loop. Two FLFOs (Flexible LFOs because we like naming things like that) with five shape-defining controls each. A sample and hold. A modulation system with macros and a right-click context menu. Built-in chorus, dual delay, and reverb. MPE. MTS-ESP. The full apparatus.

If that paragraph sounded exhausting, that is the correct reaction. Quanta 2 is a deep instrument, and we recommend treating it as one. Some practical tips:

• The fastest way to fall in love with Quanta 2 is to drop a sample on it and start playing. Don't reach for the modulation panel. Don't look at the filter section. Just drop a sample on it and play notes for a while. The grain engine will do most of the work, and what it does is pretty good out of the box.
• The two virtual analog oscillators do not have to go through the grain engine. They can run alongside the granular sound, or be granularized, or replace the granular sound entirely. Layering a granular cloud with a clean sub oscillator is one of the more rewarding things you can do here, and it solves the eternal granular-synth problem of "this sounds beautiful but I can't hear the bass."
• Grain Pitch Quantization is the unsung hero. Set the grain engine to a generous amount of pitch randomization, then quantize the result to a scale, and the sound moves from "interesting chaos" to "useful musical part" with one switch.
• The four Macro knobs in the modulation panel can be assigned to MIDI CC, so you can drive Quanta from a hardware controller without having to relearn the controller every time you load a new preset. This is useful in a way that is hard to overstate once you set it up once.

Quanta 2 is $129. The demo runs for twenty minutes at a stretch, after which it stops making sound until you reload it, which is its way of telling you it is time to make up your mind.

Descent is the effect version of the same general idea. Where Quanta 2 plays grains as notes, Descent takes whatever audio you feed it and turns it into a cloud of grains in real time. It is, depending on how you set it, a granular delay, a granular reverb, a pitch shifter, a freezer, a shimmer effect, or a sustain pedal for things that do not have sustain pedals.

Descent is also, by some considerable margin, the easiest of our granular plugins to use. One set of controls. Grain count goes from 1 to 50. There are six axes of randomization (pitch, pan, position, amplitude, duration, and grain count). Direction can be forward, reverse, or random. The feedback path has a diffusion control that turns long delay times into reverb-like washes without falling apart at high values, which is the failure mode that ruins most granular effects.

Some practical tips:

• A few long grains with minimal randomization gives you a subtle, thickening delay that sits inside a mix instead of on top of it. This is the setting you probably want most of the time.
• Cranking the grain count and the overlap, with a high feedback amount and the diffusion turned up, gives you an infinite-sustain pad. Set it once, play a chord, and walk away to get a cup of coffee. The chord will still be there.
• Set pitch quantization to octaves and fifths, push the pitch randomization, add diffusion: shimmer reverb. This is the same trick the famous Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois shimmer reverb does, except you have control over every step of the process instead of having to set up a complicated feedback chain in your DAW.
• Reverse mode on vocals, with quantized pitches and high diffusion, gives you the sound used on the opening title sequence of every prestige television drama since 2014, approximately.

Descent is $29. Like everything we make, it runs on Mac, Windows, Linux, and iOS.

Other Desert Cities, our six-algorithm delay plugin, has a granular algorithm called Sky Valley, and a post about our granular plugins that did not mention it would be intellectually dishonest. (See the delay plugin comparison post for the full ODC overview.)

Sky Valley is a pitch-shifting granular delay. You set the delay time, you set the grain size, you set the pitch and the pitch scatter, and you set how much the grains move around in the buffer. What comes back is somewhere between a granular synth and a delay; the source material is whatever you put through the plugin, but it returns as grains, in the time and pitch domains you specified.

Because Sky Valley lives inside ODC, it inherits ODC's whole modulation system: two tempo-synced LFOs, an envelope follower with sidechain input, and a global diffusor at the end of the chain. You can modulate grain size with an LFO. You can duck the granular signal with the envelope follower. You can pitch-quantize the grain output to octaves and pull harmonically rich evolving textures out of a monophonic source. Cellos through this thing are devastating, in both the good way and the slightly funereal way.

Some practical tips:

• Octave pitch quantization plus a slow LFO on grain position is the recipe for the "evolving ambient pad from a guitar take" sound that you have heard on records, and that is otherwise a pain to set up.
• The diffusor at the end of the chain is the difference between Sky Valley sounding like a granular delay and Sky Valley sounding like a granular reverb. Turn it up for lush. Turn it down for bite. There is no wrong answer.
• High crossfeed and slow grain rates produce stereo cloud effects that are otherwise difficult to assemble. Mono inputs are fine. The cloud will be stereo when it comes out.
• If Sky Valley sounds too clean for what you want, switch to ODC's Mecca (reverse) or Mirage (multi-head) algorithms, and run their output through a separate instance of Descent on an aux send. You can build very long granular signal chains this way without anything turning into mud.

So which one do you need?

If you want an instrument, Quanta 2. If you want an effect, Descent. If you already own ODC, you have a granular delay built in, and you may not need either of the others. If you don't own ODC, you probably want it for other reasons.

Or, more honestly: if you are the kind of person who reads a post like this all the way to the end, you probably want all three. They overlap less than you would think. Quanta 2 is for designing instruments and sample-based performance. Descent is for processing audio in real time. Sky Valley inside ODC is the third thing, which is somewhere between the other two and has its own personality.

Demo versions of all three are on their respective product pages. They all run on Mac, Windows, Linux, and iOS. None of them require an iLok, a subscription, or a serial number. We don't have a copy protection scheme, partly because the people determined enough to circumvent one are going to do it anyway, and partly because we don't want to spend our limited time on this Earth writing copy protection schemes.

Chris Randall
Bellows Falls, Vermont