GRAINSCAPE is a new piece of software from Audiobulb the makers of Lissajous, Ambient, Auxture and others. It’s a Max For Live device that works in your DAW or as a standalone.
An excellent piece of software for messing audio up in realtime
GRAINSCAPE is a new piece of software from Audiobulb the makers of Lissajous, Ambient, Auxture and others. It’s a Max For Live device that works in your DAW or as a standalone. Essentially, GRAINSCAPE is a four channel granular synth and multi-effect with midi controlled random and preset function. Each channel has separate effects per channel. There are 4 effect/channel called reverser, delay, reverb, filter. There are parameters galore to tweak, adjust and flat out mess with to do things to your sound that are normally prohibited by The Hague and certain arcane aspects of the Geneva Convention. In all seriousness, it’s a fascinating tool to mess up sound in an infinite number of ways. GRAINSCAPE is a versatile granular sound design and composition tool allowing you to perform sorcery via:
- Playheads and Modulation
- Grains
- Effects
- Random and Preset Options
- Position Midi
- Create and Record
“But how does it work, CRT?” you may well ask. Well, check it out in action here on my track “Remangulator”:
The hollow tone throughout the track is a sample of a bell dropped into GRAINSCAPE. With only a little manipulation and some automation it’s turned into a scratchy drone and several other things during the track. In use I enjoy it and often I found myself cackling as I scramble to turn down the volume on my speakers. The results from GRAINSCAPE are truly infinite and often bizarre. I had few issues using it especially given Ableton Live 11’s notorious CPU issues. Something like this usually provokes a crash in Live but surprisingly it worked fine. Something I hope to see in future updates is all parameters being named. Perhaps it was an issue on my end but most are not identified and only show up in Live’s dropdown menu with generic names. Therefore one must do a bit of hunting to find the parameter to be adjusted. It’s a minor gripe as it’s an easy thing to fix I’m sure. This didn’t impede my usage of GRAINSCAPE or workflow in any way.
TLDR: GRAINSCAPE is an excellent piece of software for messing audio up in realtime wherever and whenever you need it.
GRAINSCAPE is available on Audiobulb. [Website]
