Baby Audio has launched its Grainferno instrument, offering granular synthesis and allowing you chop up and manipulate any sample to create new sounds and textures.
Granular synthesis isn’t new, and many DAWs and other plugins already exist to allow you to manipulate samples in this way — Baby Audio suggests their offering is highly advanced and offers huge control over nearly every parameter.
Granular synthesis is great fun to play with, with almost infinite results possible because you can feed in any audio sample and then manipulate and perform with it in uncountable ways.
It’s not immediately obvious what Grainferno offers that the likes of Pigments, Absynth, and even built-in DAW granular synths don’t, but a trawl through initial listings and reviews suggest that it’s trying to push a version of granular synthesis which is more musical than simply textural (though it seems highly capable of doing that, too).
Put simply, if you chop up a sample into small enough pieces, those individual grains stop sounding simply like chopped up audio and more like oscillators. This means you can chop and then play across pitches various samples, while still retaining a lot of the intrinsic audio qualities of the original sample.
Of course, a simple sampler can pitch shift samples, but here you have vast degrees of manipulation, morphing samples into completely different beasts before then letting them be played over a range of notes.
Grainferno can also run two sources simultaneously and morph between the two. Other systems can do similar, of course, but Grainferno sets out to make it simpler to “just do it”.
In addition, Grainferno can make granular synthesis more predictable (though it includes randomisation if you want it). This is achieved with features such as tempo-synced grain rate, pitch tracking and auto-tuning, and BPM syncing. This leads to more intentional creation of playable instruments.
Take a look at the video for more info on it:
Grainferno is available now, currently at 39% off, or alternatively you can sub-to-own over a six month period.
