Recently I’ve been on a hardware granular synthesis search (we’re in a renaissance) and I love seeing how each box (1010music - Lemon Drop, Tasty Chips - GR-1 and GR-MEGA, Oddment Audio - groc, and the plinky and Tempera) implements their particular version of granular synthesis because I can steal their ideas!
I watch a tutorial or demo video, and they explain how the hardware works. I can then go and open up Notepad++ and code up my own version of their instruments in Csound. For free. I don’t even have to subscribe to their silly hardware limitations, either.
It doesn’t exactly stop me GASing over some of them (man, the groc looks sexy, though it’s a bit early to tell how good it is), but it does at least prevent me from making too many impulse purchases.
This turned into a bit more of a CSound rave than I intended again. Seriously though, if you’re interested in sound synthesis and are even mildly technologically inclined, I really advise learning either Csound or one of the other languages like Supercollider or ChucK. The only problem is that every piece of hardware after that is going to be a disappointment.
Yeah, I actually bought one after firmware 5.0 put in granular synthesis. It’s not a half-bad implementation. Especially given how much the Microfreak costs compared to any other hardware granular synth. I do wish transferring samples were less painful. Arturia’s software seems to fail more often than it succeeds. It never succeeds at transferring more than one sample at a time.
Not really. I joined the Sound on Sound forum, but it’s a few old Brits who hardly interact. Since the Reddit-splosion, I get my synth news on places like synthanatomy.com and synthtopia.com, then periodically talk about it to myself here.