Here is the first publicly released Youtube video of the Adroit Synthesis Granular Synth in action...
https://youtu.be/mX0Nmrb6fXM
The demo consists of just the Granular Synth plugged directly into Voltage Modular's main outputs. No other module or post production is involved and the only control is being done using the mouse cursor that is visible.
This video only just scratches the surface of what the module is capable of even though it's 8 minutes in length.
More details to follow.
Introducing the Granular Synth (Youtube)
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UrbanCyborg
- Posts: 599
- Joined: Mon Nov 15, 2021 9:23 pm
Re: Introducing the Granular Synth (Youtube)
A thing of beauty, and a joy to behold! Your demo got my creative mojo cross-mojinating. Can't wait!
Reid
Reid
Cyberwerks Heavy Industries -- viewforum.php?f=76
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GusGranite
- Posts: 73
- Joined: Fri May 14, 2021 2:16 am
Re: Introducing the Granular Synth (Youtube)
Looks sweet! Have subbed your YT channel.
Re: Introducing the Granular Synth (Youtube)
Sensational!
______________________
Dome Music Technologies
Dome Music Technologies
Re: Introducing the Granular Synth (Youtube)
Many thanks for such positive feedback, it's much appreciated.
I'm going to post a few thoughts on things like performance, how pitch control is handled, interfacing with LSSP, ancillary modules and schedule but first up...
Why has Granular Processor become Granular Synth?
My original intention was to produce a module that worked both as a synthesizer and as an effects unit. But just after posting the Sneak Peek on this forum I realised that it was too much of a compromise.
Continuing down that path would have resulted in a module that took up way too many pixels of horizontal space, would be difficult to market, difficult to use and ultimately just not be a well designed piece of kit.
The most powerful creative tools in a designer's arsenal are the sharp knife and the waste basket. So I changed tack to focus purely on creating a Granular Synthesizer. A future project will address the effects side of things and this will open up enough space to incorporate ideas that I have that go well beyond granular effects.
I'm going to post a few thoughts on things like performance, how pitch control is handled, interfacing with LSSP, ancillary modules and schedule but first up...
Why has Granular Processor become Granular Synth?
My original intention was to produce a module that worked both as a synthesizer and as an effects unit. But just after posting the Sneak Peek on this forum I realised that it was too much of a compromise.
Continuing down that path would have resulted in a module that took up way too many pixels of horizontal space, would be difficult to market, difficult to use and ultimately just not be a well designed piece of kit.
The most powerful creative tools in a designer's arsenal are the sharp knife and the waste basket. So I changed tack to focus purely on creating a Granular Synthesizer. A future project will address the effects side of things and this will open up enough space to incorporate ideas that I have that go well beyond granular effects.
Re: Introducing the Granular Synth (Youtube)
Performance
This is not a lightweight module so performance was a key issue that I had to address in its design.
To give some perspective, the kind of things shown in the demo create a total CPU load varying somewhere between about 4% and 18% on my Ryzen 7 4800H laptop. With higher grain counts producing higher load.
A word of caution about CPU load. Audio glitches occur well before one reaches 100% load (typically at about 40% for me but your milage may vary as there are so many variables). CPU load is just a very approximate guide to efficiency.
Some of you are using machines that, while perhaps being state of the art five years ago, are not exactly state of the art now. Some have machines far less powerful than this. Others have machines that are truly state of the art. In a few years time things will have moved on considerable and some of us will have upgraded. So the range of machine capabilities to consider is huge.
In an effort to try and please everybody the Granular Synth (GS) is scalable. On a powerful machine you can turn the MAX GRAINS knob all the way up and chew 500 simultaneous grains both in audio and graphics - so you could think of GS as being a 500 voice multi-timbral stereo synthesizer with a matching lightshow. But running 500 grains will use up a sizeable chunk of CPU and GPU even on a high-end contemporary machine.
(Note GS will only pump out anything like 500 grains when RATE and SIZE are maxed out and you have positive modulation on top of that. But there is a secret weapon for consuming grains called the Sowing Machine that I haven't told you about yet).
In the video the MAX GRAINS knob is set at approximately 250 so you can see by the pie chart in the bottom left what proportion of that 250 is being used. Much of the time there are less than 20 simultaneous grains active.
But what about running on a very old or low power machine?
First, if you don't have modern graphics acceleration you can turn off the lightshow by unchecking "Display All Grains" in the Settings. You'll then end up with a single circle on the display showing you the life story of one solitary grain at a time. This gives you just enough visual info to figure out roughly what is going on, even though it's not anything like as much fun as looking at pretty clouds.
You'll then probably need to turn down the MAX GRAINS knob to use "Grain Stealing" - something akin to note stealing but rather more sophisticated. The MAX GRAINS knob enables you to dial the maximum number of grains produced anywhere between 500 and 2.
So a preset designed to run on a top end machine can still run on a battered old PC if you simply turn down the MAX GRAINS knob, but they will obviously sound different. The former will be lush and multi-dimensional and the latter will get the message across as best it can.
GS Grain Stealing works on reducing the number of simultaneous grains in as transparent a way as possible. This involves an algorithm that determines a grain's "sonic worth" in order to rank the impact of shortening its lifespan. But the stealing process isn't just a matter of terminating a grain, instead a series of more and more aggressive tactics are used to hurry along a grain's retirement as the number of grains approaches the limit set by MAX GRAINS. The basics of this are already in place but I'm working on refining it as it's a pretty important aspect of making GS scalable across machines.
This is not a lightweight module so performance was a key issue that I had to address in its design.
To give some perspective, the kind of things shown in the demo create a total CPU load varying somewhere between about 4% and 18% on my Ryzen 7 4800H laptop. With higher grain counts producing higher load.
A word of caution about CPU load. Audio glitches occur well before one reaches 100% load (typically at about 40% for me but your milage may vary as there are so many variables). CPU load is just a very approximate guide to efficiency.
Some of you are using machines that, while perhaps being state of the art five years ago, are not exactly state of the art now. Some have machines far less powerful than this. Others have machines that are truly state of the art. In a few years time things will have moved on considerable and some of us will have upgraded. So the range of machine capabilities to consider is huge.
In an effort to try and please everybody the Granular Synth (GS) is scalable. On a powerful machine you can turn the MAX GRAINS knob all the way up and chew 500 simultaneous grains both in audio and graphics - so you could think of GS as being a 500 voice multi-timbral stereo synthesizer with a matching lightshow. But running 500 grains will use up a sizeable chunk of CPU and GPU even on a high-end contemporary machine.
(Note GS will only pump out anything like 500 grains when RATE and SIZE are maxed out and you have positive modulation on top of that. But there is a secret weapon for consuming grains called the Sowing Machine that I haven't told you about yet).
In the video the MAX GRAINS knob is set at approximately 250 so you can see by the pie chart in the bottom left what proportion of that 250 is being used. Much of the time there are less than 20 simultaneous grains active.
But what about running on a very old or low power machine?
First, if you don't have modern graphics acceleration you can turn off the lightshow by unchecking "Display All Grains" in the Settings. You'll then end up with a single circle on the display showing you the life story of one solitary grain at a time. This gives you just enough visual info to figure out roughly what is going on, even though it's not anything like as much fun as looking at pretty clouds.
You'll then probably need to turn down the MAX GRAINS knob to use "Grain Stealing" - something akin to note stealing but rather more sophisticated. The MAX GRAINS knob enables you to dial the maximum number of grains produced anywhere between 500 and 2.
So a preset designed to run on a top end machine can still run on a battered old PC if you simply turn down the MAX GRAINS knob, but they will obviously sound different. The former will be lush and multi-dimensional and the latter will get the message across as best it can.
GS Grain Stealing works on reducing the number of simultaneous grains in as transparent a way as possible. This involves an algorithm that determines a grain's "sonic worth" in order to rank the impact of shortening its lifespan. But the stealing process isn't just a matter of terminating a grain, instead a series of more and more aggressive tactics are used to hurry along a grain's retirement as the number of grains approaches the limit set by MAX GRAINS. The basics of this are already in place but I'm working on refining it as it's a pretty important aspect of making GS scalable across machines.
Re: Introducing the Granular Synth (Youtube)
Thanks for thinking of us poor VM users. Perhaps I will own a Granular Synth Capable PC in 10 years when the prices on current top of the line models are affordable. Oh, and thanks for the detailed warning.
Re: Introducing the Granular Synth (Youtube)
Hi Steve,
The point I was trying to make in my own very long-winded way was that the Granular Synth is designed to run on anything from the most modest of machines all the way up to machines that aren't on the market yet.
Try demoing Granular Synth when it's released. You might be surprised to find that it is actually usable on your machine if you uncheck Display All Grains and set MAX GRAINS to something like 15. It really depends on what spec your machine is. Is it a really old Celeron powered thing with 2 GB of memory or something?
Part of the motivation in designing GS was actually to squeeze more out of VM than is currently possible. One use case is to use VM at the limit of what your machine can manage and capture the result in one or more sample files. Do this repeatedly so you end up with say ten sample files.
Then run GS and load the first of these samples then repeatedly hit the Append button to join all the samples together in one long buffer. Then use the Sowing Machine to make each of these parts selectable. Finally sequence the Sowing Machine to bring all the components back to life. You can do this kind of things with a sampler of course but the GS/Sowing Machine combo offers all kinds of interesting extra possibilities.
The point I was trying to make in my own very long-winded way was that the Granular Synth is designed to run on anything from the most modest of machines all the way up to machines that aren't on the market yet.
Try demoing Granular Synth when it's released. You might be surprised to find that it is actually usable on your machine if you uncheck Display All Grains and set MAX GRAINS to something like 15. It really depends on what spec your machine is. Is it a really old Celeron powered thing with 2 GB of memory or something?
Part of the motivation in designing GS was actually to squeeze more out of VM than is currently possible. One use case is to use VM at the limit of what your machine can manage and capture the result in one or more sample files. Do this repeatedly so you end up with say ten sample files.
Then run GS and load the first of these samples then repeatedly hit the Append button to join all the samples together in one long buffer. Then use the Sowing Machine to make each of these parts selectable. Finally sequence the Sowing Machine to bring all the components back to life. You can do this kind of things with a sampler of course but the GS/Sowing Machine combo offers all kinds of interesting extra possibilities.
Re: Introducing the Granular Synth (Youtube)
Recently I've been a little caught up in refining the compression but will post some info about pitch control shortly.
Compression is pretty critical in a granular synth as the output can vary from a tiny single grain that's barely audible all the way up to enormous lush clouds of hundreds of grains that threatened to overwhelm.
It's taken quite a bit of tweaking to find a way to tame such a large dynamic range while operating with reasonable transparency and using only a single knob; although the actual result is a fairly simple compressor with fixed threshold, attack and release and a knob that varies the ratio from 1:1 (no compression) to 16:1 (hard compression). The default 8:1 setting works nicely most of the time. I've also added a little LED that shows roughly how much gain reduction is applied.
Compression is pretty critical in a granular synth as the output can vary from a tiny single grain that's barely audible all the way up to enormous lush clouds of hundreds of grains that threatened to overwhelm.
It's taken quite a bit of tweaking to find a way to tame such a large dynamic range while operating with reasonable transparency and using only a single knob; although the actual result is a fairly simple compressor with fixed threshold, attack and release and a knob that varies the ratio from 1:1 (no compression) to 16:1 (hard compression). The default 8:1 setting works nicely most of the time. I've also added a little LED that shows roughly how much gain reduction is applied.
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