Hey, guys, so today I want to talk to you about one of the most underrated and overlooked types
of synthesis - granular synthesis. In this video I'm going to show you exactly what it is how to use
it and when and why you might want to use it in your productions. Producers like Flume and Virtual
Riot are well known for their use of granular synths but the idea behind granular synthesis
actually came about over half a century ago, and we'll touch upon that in a couple of minutes, but
before we get into all that juicy stuff let's listen to an idea that's using just a normal
synth and then we're going to switch it out for a granular synth and hear the difference.
Pretty cool, huh? I just love the extra texture and depth that it brings. Before we jump into
it though, I want to say a huge shout out to my Accelerator students who have racked up
millions of streams over the past 12 months. Top work, guys, and if you want coaching with me, you
can check out the Accelerator program below this video. Okay, first off what's granular synthesis
and how did it come about? Well, unlike other forms of synthesis, like subtractive, additive,
frequency modulation, a granular synthesizer will actually use a sample as its source rather than
an oscillator. The name comes from the fact that it chops up the inputted sample into very short
durations of time and these are called grains now a grain in the audio world usually means a
sound that's between about 5 and 200mm as long so pretty short in other words the synthesizer
can then manipulate and play back those grains in different ways to create really interesting
and unique sounds that you couldn't possibly create with any of the other types of synthesis
now there are plenty of software granular synths available on the market today but four of the
most popular the quantitu by Audio damage the granulator 2 which comes free with Max for live
portal by output and we'll touch upon that a bit later and pigments by arturia now we look
at all the key parts of granular synthesis in a minute but first let's really briefly touch
upon the history of it now believe it or not the concept behind granular synthesis dates all the
way back to 1946 when Hungarian British engineer and physicist Dennis Gabor conceptualized the
idea that you could create new sounds out of micro sound particles now the first artist to use this
technique in music was experimental music icon ianis synarkis who physically splice together
hundreds of different tape recordings to create the piece analogic a b and here's a clip of that
now fast forward a couple of decades and that's when computer engineers and music technologists
started developing this to use in computers in about 1975 and it's just gone from strength to
strength since then okay now on to the important how do you use it well we're going to look at
every single parameter that most of these synths have and then we're going to look at some examples
of where this really excels and where it's not so good okay so the first of these synths I'm going
to be showing you today is pigments by arturia and that is because it really easily displays what's
actually going on when it comes to granular synthesis and this synth actually has several
different features that you can use but we're just going to be focusing on granular synthesis today
so to do that you just make sure that you choose sample from the engine type so you've got analog
wave table harmonic but we're going to go with sample because then that is going to base the
sound as the source of a sample okay I've turned the effect off so now it's basically operating
as a sampler wood it's just playing back that piano sample every time we hit a note but if we
turn on granular mode that's when it's going to change pigments into a granular synthesizer and
I can start walking through what each of these parameters do and this is just a great tool for
actually visually showing what it's doing as well as hearing it so firstly I'm just going to make
sure that our main adsr controls for amplitude are set up so we've just got full sustain so we
can see it's just the shape of this piano that's making it die out like that okay so let's look
at these main controls now we've got density we've got the shape of each separate grains
adsr and then we've got the time which is the length that each grain plays at now if we have
this density set right down then it's just going to play it through once and it's going to take
a while before that repeats because this is such a slow Hertz amount so the more we speed this up
foreign [Music] is played speeds up and then you start guessing to that point where you're
kind of creating sustained pad sounds okay so that's what the density does is how quickly it
plays back those grains now the size is simply the length of each those grains so when it's set
to full time and one density it's in effect just playing through that piano sample but
if we reduce that length of time the grain is shorter so and if we do that with the density
as well so increase the density it's going to create more of a glitchy kind of staccato sound
because each of those grains is shorter like so now the last thing of these main controls
I want to look at is the shape here and this is an adsr amplitude control for each separate
grain that's played so at the moment you can see it's a saw shape if we move that over here
it's going to fade in each grain and then fade it out much like it would with a normal amp envelope
and you've got a few other shapes usually that you can choose from as well just to give you a
few more options so let's just increase the density a bit we've smoothed it off and then
we're starting to create these lovely smooth sounds now when it comes to the random settings
these again are prevalent in pretty much all granular synths this is when you can
start adding some variation to how those grains are played and this is where things get really
interesting so the first thing we're going to look at is start and this is basically the point
at which the grain is played back from so at the moment all of those grains are starting from the
beginning of that sample if we add some variation it's going to start playing some of those grains
from different points in the sample so you can see they're triggering at different points from
within that sample if we click this effect here or this button here we can choose whether all of the
random start points are after the beginning of the start of the sample or before the other ones it's
just it's just gonna randomize things a bit more if you choose both for example and then they're
going to be bouncing all over the place now pitch is where you can change the pitch of each of those
separate grains and this is where things get very audibly different so at the moment it's
set to change the pitch both up and down and let's randomize some of these pitches of the piano notes
[Music] so you can hear it starting to get really crazy kind of like a scary film especially if we
increase the density [Music] oh scary stuff and this is where we can actually randomize
the density as well so here you'll remember we set our density to trigger each of those
grains to a particular Hertz so at the moment it's 16 Hertz but we can make that vary so some
of them are going to trigger more slowly some of them are going to trigger and repeat faster
foreign let's just take that pitch down because it's literally giving my brain nightmares
so a bit of a detune variation sounds quite cool now direction is whether
those samples playing forwards are actually backwards so you can see here if we switch it
some of these are now going backwards instead of forwards
size is as you would imagine just varying the size of some of these grains so some will be shorter
some will be longer width is varying the stereo width like whether they're panned left or right
so you can hear things start to get lovely and wide at this point
and then volume is simply the volume at which those different grains are played
so that's the general basics of granular synthesis and as I said pigments has a really nice display
to show you what's going on but now I want to get really creative and I'm going to jump into
a second really good one which is called quanta two so quantity operates in a similar way from
the pigments because it's a granular synth but there are more features in this because it's
just a granular synth and I'm going to open it up and the first thing I want to point out is
that I really like it because you can just drag and drop samples straight into the GUI or GUI
whereas in pigments you've got to kind of go into the system find the menu that says import sound
Etc it's just much quicker this way okay so if we have a look at the general controls we've got
grains which is the grain density or the amount of grains we've got the length of each grains we
can tune it we can find unit we can randomize each of those things as well the density and the length
just like in the pigments we've got the wave table position and we can randomize the position as well
and we've got level width same as we've got on the other one okay and the envelope shape so I've
just Dragged In A synth Loop now I really like granular synthesis when you're operating with some
kind of harmonic content you can even pull in full tracks and start glitching around with those but I
really like synth Loops guitar Loops something that's not too long but the changes notes and
has got harmonic content in it so we're going to bring in this Loop here just a jolly little
synth Loop and we've just dragged that in like so and then let's just hit play and see what happens
already sounds amazing straight away let's shift to position [Music]
so cool so let's fiddle around with some of these controls and see what
we can come up with so I'm going to randomize the position a bit
so we can see here it's going to dance around a little bit more
increase the grains and the length and that's going to turn it into more of a pad
so you can get such beautiful Rich soundscapes the other great thing about quanta 2 is the fact
you've got envelopes and lfos that you can assign to different parameters and really
just create some interesting movement as well as effects which you can add in as
well but I'm not going to do that for the time being because I want to just focus on
granular synthesis today so to create some more movement in this I'm just going to pull down
some of these because I actually preferred it before it was randomizing the position too much
I think that sounds really cool like that but what I want to do is have this position kind
of modulate with an LFO so I'm just going to right click on it I'm going to choose
the source to be flf01 let's just click that make sure it's actually affecting it
so we can see it's dancing around that position now
which already sounds really cool and if we go over to the modulation tab
we can actually now control the speed at which this modulation is occurring
slowly or quickly and the shape of that wave as well much like you would with any synth so yeah
a really really cool synth and I'm going to show you an example of me creating a track using this
technique in a couple of minutes okay so where is granulosynthesis useful for and where is it not so
good for well it really excels when it comes to creating really interesting Rich pads and
textures as we've heard in a couple of examples so far in terms of where I find granular synthesis
not so useful is when you need to have a really tight control over the tombral information of a
sound now that sounds a bit complicated but if you think of a bass sound the sub bass anything below
about 100 to 120 hertz you usually want to have maximum control over that because it makes such
a big difference to the entire mix and the entire track in those cases I would tend to reach for a
different instrument to create the really solid low down bass sounds and that's the main example
the other is when it comes to Drums so if you load in a drum Loop into a granular sampler yes you can
work with it but it tends not to sound as good or as interest testing is if you're using harmonic
content or melodic content again these are just rules of thumbs absolutely go for it experiment
your heart out but this is what I've personally found works best now both of the granular synths
I've shown you today both involve having to bring in a sample which the synthesizer can then turn
into grains and process I mentioned earlier a synth called portal by output and the difference
with this is that it actually does it real time so for example you could bring a portal or an
instance a portal in after a normal synthesizer or a normal sampler and it's going to process and
granulate that signal in real time it's pretty amazing okay for this example I wanted to show
you what it's like if you do bring in a full track and load it into a granular synth so I've created
some drums let's just have a quick listen to them [Music] like a bit of a low five eye
cool so it's a bit chilled and I haven't put any other instrumentation in there because I'm going
to allow the full track sample to dictate what the key of the track will be because it's all about
experimenting with those lovely chords that lovely harmonic content that's already there so I've
got a quanta here and I've already loaded in the sample it's an old everything but the girl track
so you can really recycle older music as well and let's just see what is going on here so you can
already hear interesting sounds like that now what I've done for this instrument instead of having
the tune control key mapped to the keyboard so when you press it it's going to play that sample
lower down when you go up the keyboard it's going to press it higher up all I've done is I right
clicked on position and I assigned the destination of this to be the keyboard so what that means
is when I press different keys on the keyboard it's going to play different positions foreign
and you can already hear it's creating some interesting sounds I've got relatively few grains
because I want you to be able to hear like the vocal hits and whatnot if I push it up too much
especially with the drums it just sounds a bit like a geiger counter so I'm having
it kind of lower down I've made them quite long so they're quite smooth
as opposed to Super glitchy like that and that's how you kind of get that flumey sound and that's
pretty much it I've just pushed the width up so now it's a case of trying to find bits that
you really like and jamming along to the track so let's just try that I've also added the sidechain
compressor to duck it against the kick but I might not need that so let's just have a listen
foreign
to it [Music]
so I'm just gonna copy this in now cool so now I'm going to
program in the Baseline and this is the end result
so I've just added a little bit of randomization on the position
and then created the bass notes to follow the chords that were determined really by
just experimenting with the position on where the grains start playing in the granular Cinema
so I think that sounds pretty cool but there are so many more things that we can now do with this
sound from the granular synth to make it even more interesting and it's a great way to develop your
signature sound so I put together 13 of my most powerful creative sound design techniques in this
next video here but before you head over there if you did enjoy this please like it subscribe
to my channel hit that notification Bell if you do want tutorials each and every week for music
production and thank you so much for watching I will catch you over at that next video [Music]