What's your favourite granulator object?

richhop's icon

Anyone have any favourites I should check out? Went through the sampling examples already, just wondering if there's some nice sounding fancy ones I should look into as well.

Wetterberg's icon
richhop's icon

Ahh yeah man thanks this is great, sounds so wet and watery, really does sound like super high quality one thanks and the real time pitch shifting sounds really sweet as well :) Thanks!!

davidestevens's icon

I think I've tried most all of the different granulators out there. My absolute favourite, for smoothness of sound and lack of artifacts, is still elasticx~, but development on that seems to have stopped, and there are occasional problems using it in Max6.1 (situations I haven't ever managed to nail down that cause dsp to "blow up").

My 2nd favourite is a close tie between Brendan McCloskeys "granny" (actually the closest to the smooth sound of elasticx~ that I've found) and the original granulation patch from sakonda. The latter has a nice sound, but you_do get pulsing, which I want sometimes.

I bought svp based on comments on the forum, but I haven't managed to get anything like the kind of sound I want from it - it's too metallic and artificially smooth for my taste.

I just found this one too, which I haven't tried yet...

sugarsynth is worth looking at.

I'm now wondering (unless I've misunderstood what's been announced) if the new time stretch functions in Max7 will be radical enough to provide reliable built-in extreme time stretching, and render my reliance on elasticx~ a thing of the past.

brendan mccloskey's icon

Thanks for the shout out David; here's the latest gen-based version of my granulator, which aspires to the buttery goodness of Timo's grainstretch, but also decorrelates grain size from pitch (I can't remember if grainstretch also does this), and employs an inexpensive but effective interonset parameter and reverb effect.

genGrains_share.zip
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brendan mccloskey's icon

. . . . but J.F. Charles' spectral processing tools are peerless IMO

Gregory Taylor's icon

You are *entirely* too humble, Brendan. Your gen~ thing sounds absolutely beautiful, and the grain size/pitch decorrelation is wonderful. I raise my glass to you [okay, it's a cup of coffee, but the sun isn't anywhere near the yard arm yet].

spectro's icon

Well, if we're doing a survey, another worthy contender is mubu.granular~ that comes as part of the larger (and free) IRCAM mubu package.

richhop's icon

@DAVIDESTEVENS you are absolute legend thank you for all the suggestions to check out!

. . . . but J.F. Charles’ spectral processing tools are peerless IMO

By Spectral processing, are they anything like the Michael Norris Spectral Tools, like FFT based granulation and stretching stuff?

And just played with your gen grain patch, this is really sick thanks for sharing :)!

davidestevens's icon

So as to keep all these resources in one thread, here's the link to J F Charles patches...

and a related article...

and Sakonda's original granular patches (inc sugarSynth)

brendan mccloskey's icon

@Gregory

Humility is a trait I often stand convicted of, by my project supervisors and most recently at my doctoral defense. It is an admirable trait, but there's a time and a place for it - a viva voce is not one of those occasions ;)

I'm heartened by all the positive comments above re gen-grains; please hack, amend, improve and distribute

Peace

ps. David, it takes some hunting to find Sakonda's original source, doesn't it?

davidestevens's icon

@brendan Just trying out the new version. Very very nice. The only thing I haven't managed to figure out (as I haven't gotten into Gen so far, though I have it) is what do I do if I want multiple players? (ie multiple instances of your patch). I can't see how to create different versions with different buffer names... ?

davidestevens's icon

@brendan oooo! and thanks for the tip about J C Charles' patches. That's given me a bunch of new ideas to add to my sound world & performance patch.

brendan mccloskey's icon

Hi David
if you wish to address different source files, you will need to create a number of different instances of the [subFin] sub patch. Inside gen, rename [peek sampill] and [buffer sampill] to, e.g. sampill_2; save THAT as [subFin_2] then in the top level patch (mainPat), duplicate the grain player with a new buffer. A little convoluted, I know, but there is also polybuffer~, though I don't know what the relationship between it and gen is like . . .

The JFC stuff is my subjective/artistic benchmark for granular synthesis.

Brendan

richhop's icon

Just got totally entranced with the mubu.granular patch, real buttery goodness and sooo smooth. Double thumbs up for that one. Cherokee never sounded so sweet, I'm going back to play again. But that's the one for me, I see that melting away many many hours for me! Thank you so much! :)

brendan mccloskey's icon

@richhop

this might not be the right place to ask, but, I installed the mubu package, and there are some Errors or Exceptions showing up in the Max debug Window; the helpfile opens ok, but with a graphic element missing and no audio. Did you have to do any installation trickery to get it to run?

Cheers
Brendan

brendan mccloskey's icon

btw

@David

if you would like me to work on an extension to this simple patch, let me know. I just had a quick browse round your website etc, and our interests, artistic and professional, seem to coincide, so I'd be happy to do that

Best
Brendan

ps C74 elves: private messaging still apparently missing here

giorgio's icon
davidestevens's icon

@brendan

let's take this off-list. my email address is davidestevens at me dot com

David

brendan mccloskey's icon
richhop's icon

@BRENDAN

I'm afraid I didn't have any problems installing mubu, running OSX 10.8.5, MAX 6.1. I just chucked the whole mubu folder into my max externals folder, or actually a folder on my desktop that has been set in the file prefs panel. Curious what are the errors in the max window?

If you're on a 32 bit PC i just read this that may or may not be useful:

- needs installation of Visual Studio 2013 Redistributable Package
- for XP, Windows XP SP3 is needed

Or maybe it's because of the update to Max 6.1.7? This guys on OSX 10.9.4, 6.1.7 and seems to have the same problem: http://forumnet.ircam.fr/user-groups/mubu-for-max/forum/topic/imubu-no-such-object/ No answer as yet but only a couple of days old. Seems people have some problems with windows as well looking at the forum. It's IRCAM so you'd think they'd be on the ball if anything stops working from upgrading OS or Max versions.

EDIT: Didn't mean to add the working mubu picture!

Screen-Shot-2014-08-09-at-14.26.10.png
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Wetterberg's icon

I'm testing out mubu.granular~ right now. I gotta say it sounds pretty brilliant. And very nice to use in the "direct" sense, where I'm not making clouds, but rather wavescanning.
Oh, and it's relatively cheap, too. The grains I've got going right now use 3% cpu, which is perfectly fine.

Hey Ircam, if you're reading this:

1) Nice work!
2) No need to include "cherokee.aif" - we already kinda have that one ;)

phiol's icon

Sorry for digging up an old thread,
but just tried the mubu.granulator~ and it's like the new and fresh little brother of the ftm&co 's gabor.granulator.
Which before now , was the best granulator I'd ever heard.

Now I was wondering if anybody else had problems downloading it on windows 8.
I tried it on my Mac and it was direct plug and play with no problems.
But I can't seem to install it on windows in both 32 & 64 bit mode? Which sadly , is the computer I need it on.
Strangely, The package only contains a Max7 folder / resources / and 2 .dll files that I can't open. Everything is missing

Anybody else had this ??
Or would have a workaround?

Thanks a lot

phiol