So yeah, y’all know me. I’m all about granular, on and on.
I’ve always got to re-explain myself and my intentions. No I don’t use VST/AU, no I don’t want hazy drone granular for guitars and synth pads, no I don’t want to work with LPB, no I don’t want to time-stretch, I don’t want the ‘new’ sound. I want old, basic granular. Some of you weren’t around yet when it came out, some of you never listened to anything from Mille Plateaux, 12K, LINEimprint, etc. You’ll hear it all over older Japanese experimental electronic music from 98 to 2006 and beyond. It’s a handy effect and does wonders for more clicks 'n cuts, glitch-type stuff.
I’ve always had a penchant for the old version of granular, stuff you’d hear from Nobuyasu Sakonda’s patches in Max/MSP - way back from 2005 and granular even before that. Renoise doesn’t have that natively, and there’s always some sort of thing the Tools we have don’t do. In this Doofer, I use a delay as a sample buffer, and it’s apparent that it’s a delay. Yet, paired with the deprecated Stutter device, you’ll get a close approximation to a monophonic Red Panda Particle 2 pedal. Not bad, not what I’d ideally like, but really pretty. Can’t adjust grain length or sample position, because it’s up to the sampler to do that, can’t do pitch-shifting, can’t do anything but make small grains and bounce 'em around the panoramic field.
Tricks for use - add more notes at an octave up for pretty tinkling. Use a convolution reverb and turn it on/off for more abstract spaciousness (and let Stutter ‘grab’ it). I made my own IR from my Chase Bliss MOOD 2 pedal’s reverb, for example.
I think you will like grain cloud especially, but the swarm delay has its utility as well. I like to stack these effects with different settings and/or automation, and in different orders for some nice dsp-driven granular fx.
Of course, the source material makes all the difference
•tweak and/or automate knobs
•use in series or parallel for a variety of granular effects
They work nice, not dissimilar to what I was working with - the glitch - grain cloud device is really good. I chose the deprecated Stutter effect for my own because it had strange decimal place values as an option and kinda ‘smeared’ or oddly chopped the sound, where yours with the Repeater has more defined segments. Nice work with yours
I just keep hoping that my granular dreams will come true in Renoise!
Are you still working at 5 lpb?
I can imagine that the grain cloud doofers sounds very different at 5 vs 16 lpb, but haven’t tested it at low lpb values…
I believe the division has always been 15 or 16 LPB in the drop-down menu, but the meter has always been some form of 5/5. The new version of repeater has sharper chopping envelopes, whereas the deprecated stutter has weird divisions on random, like 4.37 repeats, etc. This causes neat smears.
thanks so much these are fantastic tools! paired with a huge reverb like airwindows’ galactic1/2/3 it’s very simple to get endless soundscapes with this one for my ambient attempts
It’s basically a gate device with the threshold value modulated via random LFO (grit, grit rate macros) that breaks up the input sound into grains, more or less. Again, using all these doofers in conjunction with each other can yield some interesting granular results
