Granular Cloud

A granular texture engine that shatters whatever you feed it into a cloud of tiny overlapping grains. Drift it gently for shimmering, smeared ambience, or crank the density until the grains fuse into a hard, robotic comb tone. It carries a stereo image through faithfully — what you put in, you get back, only blurred.

How it works

Incoming audio is continuously recorded into an ~11-second buffer. Granular Cloud spawns short Hann-windowed grains — their length set by Size — that read from about 50 ms behind the live signal, and sums all the active grains into the output. With Pitch left at its centre (unity), pushing the spawn rate up into the audio range makes the spacing of the grains become an audible pitch — a clean, comb-like fundamental rather than a noisy mush.

Controls

  • Dens — how often grains are spawned, from sparse and airy to a dense audio-rate stream. Low settings sprinkle isolated grains for halo and reverb-like wash; high settings fuse them into a buzzing, pitched comb tone whose note tracks the spawn rate.
  • Scat — scatter. At 0% every grain reads from the same spot (coherent, tight); turn it up and each grain's read position jitters by up to ±50 ms, loosening the cloud into a wider, more diffuse smear.
  • Mix — dry/wet balance. At 100% you hear only the grain cloud; pull it back to blend the untouched input back in.
  • Size — the length of each grain, from a tiny 1 ms sliver up to a 200 ms smear. Short grains buzz and sharpen the comb-like timbre; stretch them out and each grain blurs into a longer, softer wash that overlaps into pad-like ambience.
  • Pitch — transposes each grain across 0.5x-2x, a full octave either side of unity (its centre). Left at centre the cloud keeps its clean spawn-rate fundamental; drift it off and the grains detune into a chorused shimmer, or shift it a whole octave up or down.

Inputs & outputs

  • In L / In R — the stereo source to granulate; patch audio here. A mono source gives identical left and right output.
  • Dens / Scat / Mix / Size / Pitch CV — voltage control over each knob, added on top of its setting; patch an LFO or envelope to any of them. Modulate Dens for swells that bloom from a whisper into a roar, or Pitch for a wandering, detuned drift.
  • Out L / Out R — the processed stereo cloud.

Tips

  • Park Dens low with a touch of Scat for a lush, reverb-like tail on pads and vocals.
  • Sweep Dens to its top with an envelope or LFO on Dens CV — the cloud snaps from texture into a tuned drone as the grains hit audio rate.
  • Open Size toward 200 ms for blurred, evolving pads; pull it down near 1 ms to sharpen the grains into a buzzy comb tone.
  • Because the engine preserves stereo, feeding it a wide source keeps that width; feed it mono and it stays dead-centre.