Celestine

Celestine is best described as a realtime granular processor, or, perhaps, a granular delay device.  It hosts a rolling buffer that is constantly listening to what you play, replenishing itself, and then spitting out grains and glitches based on what you feed it, making the device equally useful for live use, studio sound design, and even just finding happy accidents while you twist knobs.  It doesn't store audio for later.  It's all about the fleeting moments - the moment happening right now.  The present.

The device was inspired by boutique guitar pedals - the immediacy of instant sonic gratification.  While many granular devices rely on dropping a sample into a buffer, I wanted something that would feel more organic, more live.  Celestine is always listening, Celestine is hungry for audio. As I built this device, I was trying to imagine, "What would Chase Bliss do?".  I'm a big fan of their devices and they're a huge inspiration to me.

Celestine actually has two separate engines.  One, we'll call the grain engine, and the second we'll call the glitch engine.  The grain engine is what you might expect - a granular processor that turns the sounds fed into the device into tiny, micro grains, tiny shards of audio, then spits them out in clouds.  While granular processing is all about micro chunks of audio, you can think of the glitch engine as macro chunks.  It's also always listening, but spits out larger chunks of audio, which can then be processed by one of three algorithms (macro, up and down).

Rounding out the device, Celestine offers a hearty FX section featuring wave-folding distortion for rich harmonics, a bitcrusher that can go from subtle to digital decimation, a dreamy reverb complete with a freeze function, and the Magic effects panel seen in some of my other devices - a one stop shop to quickly alter the tone and timbre of a sound with one of seven artisanal multi-FX algorithms.

The device lends itself to melodics - vocals, keys, guitars and the like - but I've also had some nice results with percussive material.  It can be used both as an insert effect on a track, setting a nice balance between dry and wet, or as a send with the device set to fully wet, sending bits and pieces of various tracks to it.

I've put a lot of time into this one.  The development process took me about four months.  I'm asking $15 for it - I feel I could possibly ask for more, but I'm trying to be reasonable and treat this lovely community of musicians with respect - I know your money is hard-earned and I know that everyone is struggling in some way.  Your support will not only go towards the continued development of this, past devices and new ones, but also, more importantly, it'll go towards my family - putting food on the table for myself, my wife and our delightful obsessed-with-tractors toddler.  I feel very lucky to be here in this position, working from home, creating things to spark joy and inspiration for musicians.  It feels like my true calling.

Thanks for your time, for your support, and I hope you're having a very nice day. ✌️