A granular instrument that plays a guitar recording as a cloud of tiny grains. Pick a take, place the playhead, and play the keyboard to turn a moment of that recording into a pad, a stutter, a drone or a shimmer.
Grain Mini is the original, time-based version of Maru's Granular instrument, kept playable while Granular itself moves on to a different way of choosing grains.
The idea
A granular instrument does not play a recording from start to finish. It pulls many short slices, or grains, from around one point in the take, fades each one in and out, and overlaps them. Hold the playhead still and a single instant of a chord becomes a sustained sound; let it drift and the recording smears forward or backward in time.
Density and Size together decide what you hear. Few short grains are heard one by one, as a stutter. Many long ones overlap until the source stops sounding like a sample and becomes a pad. Spray keeps a frozen cloud from turning into a buzzing loop.
Controls
- Source: choose one of nine bundled electric guitar takes, from plucks and muted stabs to open chords. Position sets where in the take grains come from, Spray scatters them around that point, and Scan moves the playhead on its own, forward or backward at up to twice normal speed.
- Grains: Density is how many grains start per second, Size how long each lasts, and Size Jitter how much that varies. Window shapes each grain's fade. Reverse plays some grains backward and Stereo spreads them across the field.
- Pitch: transpose by up to two octaves either way, fine-tune in cents, and add Pitch Jitter for scattered, glassy textures. With Keytrack on, the keys you play transpose the grains.
- Filter (low-pass, band-pass or high-pass) with its own envelope amount, and an Amp envelope with attack, decay, sustain and release.
- Two LFOs, each with a shape, rate and depth, that can move position, pitch, grain size or cutoff.
- Level and Pan set the output.
Getting started
Play it from a keyboard or MIDI. Start with Frozen Chord, the pad the instrument is best at: one moment of an open chord, held still and wide. Then try Stutter Stabs for something rhythmic, Octave Drone for a bed under everything, Reverse Wash, Glass Shards or Tape Warble.
Grain Mini works with its nine bundled takes and currently runs in the browser only.
