DSP Granular Guitar

viscera's icon

Hi everyone!,
I process my guitar, and i´ve being experiencing with all the DSP. And now i want to do some granulate things, but i don´t know wich is the better way or the better object to do it in real time.
Thanks so much!
All the best.

brendan mccloskey's icon

Hi viscera
broadly speaking there are two types of 'granulation':

Granular synthesis processes simpler waveforms by creating clusters of grains of varying amplitude and envelope, thereby introducing new frequencies; almost a highly sophisticated form of amplitude modulation synthesis. If you wish to effect granular synthesis on single pre-recorded (or live) guitar pitches, these would be the 'simpler waveform'. 'Granulation', as the other term, often refers to the chopping up of a longer soundfile, to extrapolate existing timbres/transients, with independent control over pitch and duration. The objects you should look at are [buffer~] plus [grooveduck] or [play~]; the shortest route to window/envelope shapes is either [trapezoid~] or [curve~]. A vital object is [poly~]. Thes two types of granulation/granular synthesis are hereby achieved in the TIME DOMAIN.

Alternatively, you could look at FREQUENCY DOMAIN granulation, which provides arguably cleaner results (but do check out Cycling74/examples/sampling/granular); everyone goes here for the best examples of frequency spectrum manipulation:

To fill a buffer in realtime, look at the patch below.

Brendan

Max Patch
Copy patch and select New From Clipboard in Max.

ps
here's my own (late) contribution to this well-established practice:

thouldcroft's icon

There's also a great toolkit for granular synthesis/granulation called (fittingly) The Granular Synthesis Toolkit. You can find it here: www.nathanwolek.com

viscera's icon

Thanks much guys! so helpful.
All the best.