Description

Grain Mill is a granulator effect using two separate granular engines that can be mixed together to process audio. (I released a previous, old version that only uses one granulation object, but you can ignore that now. It's ugly and it's not as cool.)

Currently this is a Mac-only patch as one of the externals doesn't support Windows 64-bit architecture.

The top half of the device uses the munger~ object created by Perry R. Cook and Gary Scavone, while the bottom half uses Tom Erbe's +bubbler~ object. They should be frozen with the device.

The controls are mostly self-explanatory, though the engines operate slightly differently.

The top half contains options for the size of the grains, the the rate between grains, a ramp control (similar to a windowing function to control how quickly the volume of each grain ramps up to its max), a range knob (which dictates how much time is stored in the internal buffer that the granulator can access), a stereo spread, voice amounts, grain direction, and a pitch modulation option with a set of pitches built in to the menu.

The bottom half contains grain size controls, a density dial (which operates like a combination of voice layering and grain separation), a separation dial which controls where in the internal buffer the grains start from, a feedback control for adding feedback into the grains, a grain reverse dial, and a lowpass filter. There is also an octave modulation engine, which operates a bit differently than the other engine's pitch modulation, but it has its own flavor. Because the +bubbler is a monophonic granulator, I put two instances in if you want stereo sound (just click the little volume button).

If you're in the "stereo" mode and want to edit the right grains separately in this section, there's a barely-visible icon to bring up the controls (between Size and Density), and a little skull below it (between Size Variation and Separation) to toggle either the individual controls or shared parameters.

Both engines have their own volume meters and a sample rate reduction dial because hey, why not. You can control how much dry signal passes through with the dry/wet knob as well.

Anyway, feel free to drop me an email if you have questions, ideas, if I screwed something up, or if you get it to work on a Windows computer. Have fun/get weird with it.

Version 2.1 update: added sidechain compression because why not. Click the Grain Mill logo to open the compression section. You can use either the bottom or top section to compress the other, of if you select "both," the dry audio will be compressed by the grains. It's so pointless.