Granular Synthesis with Grain Sample Manipulator Video Lecture | Reason Tutorials: The Ultimate Guide - Video & Sound Editing

It’s no wonder that Granular synthesis has
been on the cutting edge of instrument creation
in recent years.
It’s a completely different way to think
about sound design and patch creation.
That’s why we’ve created Grain; a decidedly
“Propellerhead” take on granular synthesis.
It’s enormously powerful, highly experimental,
and just plain fun at the same time.
But rather than explaining Grain by just reading
the manual to you as an audio book, let’s
actually use Grain.
By exploring the included patches and modifying
them you’ll quickly come to understand just
how much fun Grain is.
But so it’s not ALL voodoo and magic, let’s
just quickly get on the same page with granular
synthesis with “The Musician’s Guide to
Granular Synthesis.”
Unlike almost every other style of synthesis,
which involve generating singular oscillating
electrical waveforms, granular synthesis instead
takes any digital audio file and chops it
up into very tiny segments… or grains, if
you will… and then puts those grains back
together to form complex waveforms with movement
and timbres that analog synth emulations can’t
approach.
Granular synthesis borrows heavily from the
technology born out of samplers, and because
of that it still often feels like a hybrid
between a sampling and synthesis mindset.
Let’s double click Grain in our Instruments
browser to load one up and let’s check out
some patches.
We’ll actually start with a new fantastic
bass patch if you like 808 basses.
“Boomer Bass” is a great way to get into
this instrument because it actually does the
least granular thing in Grain… or maybe
it’s better to say it does the most sampler’ish
thing… or maybe we could say… okay let’s
not say anything…
I’ll just show you.
Boomer Bass uses a now-classic 808 style long-decaying kick drum sample.
You can hear the original sample by clicking
here.
That sample displays here in Grain’s “sample
section” at the heart of Grain’s front
panel.
Using the Tape playback mode, our kick drum
audio file functions like it would on a traditional
sampler, where playing different pitches on
our keyboard moves the pitch of our kick drum
up and down accordingly.
But since Grain is a synthesizer at heart,
our patch can do some cool things, like it
has a built in analog oscillator that is providing
some sub frequency augmentation… and since
our kick sample on its own has a natural pitch drift and our oscillator does not,
using them together creates a rather pleasing
divergence as the tuning drifts apart.
And like all great synths with LFOs, Envelopes,
built in effects, and a programmer section
to make everything interact and shape our
sound, our patch has performance variations
like distorted wobble via the modulation wheel.
So you can see, even in its most basic Tape
mode
Grain is making our sample far more of a playable
complex synth patch than a basic sampler ever
does.
And if you’re the type of person who has
a whole collection of kick samples, you can
drag and drop any one of them into this patch
to get a totally different sounding 808 Bass
with the same playability and modulation this
patch offers.
Grain even analyzes the pitch of our new sample
so we can calibrate to our keyboard by simply
clicking the Set button.
That’s Tape mode.
But let’s make use of Grain’s namesake
by delving into a patch that utilizes the
granular aspect of Grain.
Check out Please Release Me… it’s a nice
etherial pad sound but its name would suggest
we release the key.
That’s really nice sounding, right?
Well unlike our Boomer Bass patch which was
just an enhanced version of the starting sample,
if we listen to the original audio file in
this patch it bears little relation to our
pad.
So what makes this… sound like this?
It’s a combination of settings on Grain
but the key to the sound is granular synthesis.
Just like I mentioned up top, this harp glissando
sample isn’t being played back traditionally
like we saw in Tape mode, but rather little
snippets of the waveform are being chopped
out and reassembled by Grain’s “Long Grains”
algorithm.
One of the easiest ways to hear the actual
grains at the heart of granular synthesis
is to play around with the Long Grains setting.
The grain length is how much audio is being
used for each grain.
If I turn that all the way down so our grains
don’t overlap you’ll hear the fluttering
sound created by the sequence of individual
grains.
We can make each grain less soft sounding
by reducing the cross fade and we can control
the interval at which each grain sounds via
the rate.
These three controls can create entirely different
sounds from the same source sample.
If we set our grain length longer, our rate
longer and increase the crossfade for our
grains we get a pulsing sound not unlike a
rotating speaker effect or an amp LFO.
In fact, at this setting you can not only
visualize the grains here as we adjust the
settings… you can actually see the sample
position indicator move along one grain at
a time when I hold a note.
The more astute viewers might ask, “but
why is that position indicator moving backwards
from the end of the sample towards the beginning?”
That behavior is coming courtesy of Grain’s
motion setting.
You see, when you deconstruct a sound into
grains you can reconstruct it any number of
ways.
The motion setting on Grain will largely be
familiar to anyone who’s worked with a sampler
before but it can go a bit further than traditional
sample playback motion.
Let’s change this patch’s motion to one
that’s pretty easy to understand…
Forward Loop.
With this motion each grain within our sample
start and end markers will play back from
start to finish and then loop over again.
So far that’s simple to understand.
Since we’ve got the grain concept let’s
change our grain length, rate, and crossfade
back towards the continuous pad sound we had
instead of this pulsing sound.
Many other motions will behave exactly like
their name suggests.
And thanks to the granularity of grain, we
have motions like End Freeze that will freeze
on the last grain within our sample range
for an infinite sustain.
The final motion setting makes use of Grain’s
powerful Envelope Section.
Instead of simple forward, backward or freezing
motion, assigning our sample to Envelope 1
and making sure to select Envelope 1 for editing
allows us to customize the motion of our grains
in almost anyway we can imagine.
This patch’s envelope setting is where our
sound got its backwards motion.
It starts at the the very end of the sample
and moves towards the start.
If we reverse that to a more traditional up
and to the right envelope our grains now go
from start to end in their motion but we can
still alter the curve of that motion for a
more exponential or logarithmic curve.
Grain comes with a library of envelope presets
for you to experiment with or modify by dragging
points, adjusting curves between points, double
clicking to add your own points, and even
choosing a sustain point where your motion
will freeze until you release a key.
The envelopes in Grain really help you sculpt
your sound.
Not just from granular motion, either.
Envelope 2 is assignable from Grain’s filter
section so if we change this preset’s default
routing so that our Long Grains sample playback
passes through our Filter, we can send that
filter to Envelope 2 and select that envelope
for editing.
When modulating the filter especially, the
preset browser can be a real source of inspiration.
Let’s select a rather busy envelope preset,
turn off that sustain behavior but turn on
the envelope loop.
Just like the other sections we’ve seen
in Grain so far, experimentation with envelopes
is a whole world of sound and movement to
explore on your own.
From here, Grain only goes deeper and deeper
into synthesizing our grains and not just
playing them back.
For example if we change this patch from Long
Grains to Spectral Grains our grains are no
longer made up of raw digital audio waveforms.
Instead Grain has analyzed each one to extract
the partial frequencies within.
It’s almost like moving from sample playback
to additive synthesis.
Once we have partials for each grain we can
adjust how closely they snap to the fundamental
note frequency… or filter out the partials
to get more or less fundamental only in our
sound.
Or we could even sculpt the balance of our
spectral partial’s volume using a custom
drawn curve which can be dialed into taste
as well.
If Spectral Grains pushes our waveform into
the additive synthesis realm then our final
granular algorithm, Grain Oscillator, moves
our sample into the traditional analog synthesis
realm.
Instead of simply playing back a sample like
we do in Tape mode or playing back grains
in sequential motion like we do with Long
Grains, we have the ability to turn grains
into a true synthesizer oscillator using the
logically named Grain Oscillator algorithm.
Since our motion and envelope behaviors don’t
change, the result is a similar yet more analog
sounding result.
Turning grains into an oscillator can stretch
a sound well past its original sample.
Check out the “Noise Poly” patch.
Our original sample is simply noise.
But from that noise we can extract and create
a very pleasing oscillator sound which I’ll
play using the Scales & Chords Player for
some big chords.
The grain oscillator moves our sample into
the subtractive synthesis realm, but with
a twist.
It’s a homogenized version of our source
sample that still manages to retain some essence
of its character.
So this round bass sample in the patch Sample
and Grain… retains that roundness when run
through the Grain Oscillator.
Today we’ve introduced you to Grain but
the best way to get to know it is to use it
yourself.
You don’t have to be a master of granular
synthesis to experiment and have fun.
You can try loading patches and changing from
one granular algorithm to the next.
You can swap the source sample and see what
effect it has on the sound.
In fact from a musical stand point, Grain
represents a whole new creative possibility
for your sample collection.
Every audio track you’ve ever recorded…
every sample in every library you have…
and every sound out on the internet… they’re
all potentially the next modern phat bass,
epic pad, or mesmerizing texture in your next
song.
Load up Grain and see for yourself just how
addictive and fun this new synth is.