For some reason i have this mental block with granular. I understand how it works, but im never able to find a place for it during music creation.
What i dont understand is how to imagine a granular sound that can fit into the track, thus making me unable to take steps for creating it.
Trial and error poking around leads me into blurry texture territorry, which is surely not the only use for it?
So question is:
do you treat granular as a type of synthesis, an effect, or something inbetween?
what are some examples of granular used in music that you like?
how different audio responds to granular and its parameters?
do you create new audio specifically to use as a source for granular?
Im thinking that perhaps i had a wrong view about what this tool can do all this time, and now im left confused. Would love to hear your experience, examples, and tips! So that hopefully i can figure out how and where to use it (and if i want to use it in general)
The reason I started using granular all those years ago was Autechre - Gantz Graf. That’ll show you what it can do as well as anything imo. Granular takes time to get a feel for, as well as allowing for a lot of happy accidents. My favourite trick is to feed it harmonically dense chords played very staccato, and leave the granular to tease out the relationships between the intervals. Tons of fun!
I think it depends on what kind of granular your device is capable of.
I have a lemondrop and it is great for granularising existing audio sections as a drone or background wash, also great at playing like a conventional synth, also nice for granularising real-time audio you send through it; not so great at granular beats, which the Microgranny was excellent for but poor as a synth (mono) but good for drones.
Sometimes I’m tweaking built in presets and audio as a synth, other times sampling my own synth audio sections as a drone or pad, and also enjoy messing with sampling other bits of music like old recordings and found sounds I record out and about.
Edit: I’m not an expert in granular, but intrigued by it and experimenting.
I’ve used it several times as part of an effect chain for background textures. Send something into a granular effect pitched down (or up) an octave, add some reverb, resample and pitch it down an octave more, reverse it, add more reverb, resample and reverse again. I just made that thing up, but that’s one of many, many examples of how I end up with a unique texture that gives a track what it’s missing.
I’ve used both the Arturia Fragments effect plugin and Pigments. It will depend a lot on how you set it up, but here are some applications I like for granular stuff based on those:
Super big, lush pads from more basic but harmonically rich sounds (in conjunction with reverb etc)
Weird random or rhythmic textures
Glitchy random beats (Fragments is great for this)
In Ableton, Beat Repeat and Grain Delay will get you some of this, too. As an experiment just now, I tried doing ‘fake granular’ in Simpler by slicing a larger sample into beats and sticking Note Echo and Random in front of it. Makes for an interesting rhythm, or add a big reverb for instant drone/ambience.
