5 Best Ways to Use Output Portal | Granular FX Plugin transcript

Hey, it's Onesto and in this video you're going to get the TLDDR on Portal. You're going to quickly know how to get the most out of this plugin so that you can get good stuff out of it as soon as possible. Here are the five best ways to use Portal by Output. Before I jump right into this tutorial, um, if you don't have Portal already, you're going to want to have it after watching this uh, video. It's seriously that good.

It's such a good plugin and there's a link in the description below that you can click and you can learn more about it. So, here is the first best way to use Portal. And it actually has nothing to do with the plugin itself. It has to do with what you should expect when using it. Portal is a granular based effect. It's as if you got your audio or MIDI instrument and uh if it had a baby with a granular synthesizer, that would be Portal.

So, that's the first way. You know, what what should you expect out of Portal? Expect that it's a granular bass effect. Just know that going in. Okay. Here's the second best way to use Portal, and it is a very straightforward way, but it gets you really, really far. Uh, so I have Portal opened up right here. I'm going to put it on completely dry. And here's the sound that we're messing with. All right, so it's kind of like this pluck.

Okay, it's more like a stab, but I'm going to show you how I used to use this plugin, and it's seriously the most underutilized way you can imagine. Uh, I think in delay there was something cool. Yes. Tremble reflection. So, this is what I used to do. I would just load up a preset, which, you know, presets is a great great great starting point. But I would just do this. Oh, cool. That's fun. And then I would just put it really low.

[Music] And you know what? That actually sounds really cool. And and you can totally get by with that. But I want to take it just a little further. I want to get you beyond just, you know, dialing back the dry wet knob. This is like the next level. So, I what I would do is start off with your dry wet knob on a preset um and have this set to a good level. Cool. And then what we're going to do is that we're going to automate with this XY table thing.

I'm going to uh first just play it uh and just see what this can do. See how it goes. Cool. [Music] So, you can see that as I am moving this around, it's giving us these fun little moments um beyond it just being static. Uh so, it's giving it more movement. It's giving it more life. And that's something that we want to bring into all of our tracks. So, what I'm going to do is we're going to record this automation. You'll see the automation get recorded here in this lane.

And uh let's just go for it. [Music] Great. Um we're just going to go with four bars. A bar is a little bit too long to to sit through. Sorry. Okay. So now that we have our X and Y being automated. So if I play it, we're see it move around. Great. So now to push it a little further, we're now going to automate our dry wet knob itself. We'll see what happens. [Music] Yeah. So I thought uh that felt good. [Music] Cool.

So, that's seriously like if you were to just watch that one this one tip here, um that's that's pretty like good and solid, I feel like. So, let's hear how this sounds all in context with my other um tracks. [Music] All right, here's the third best way to use Portal, and it is this. Um, when you're using this thing, as you're scrolling through presets, you're going to quickly find that you're going to be getting some hits and misses as you scroll through it.

Um, I knew that tremble reflection would work well this with this like chord that I had already going on, but I had to go through a few presets for me to figure out like, oh, this is the one that I want to showcase. So, what I'm trying to tell you is that when you want to use like get the most out of Portal, make sure you set some time aside to do like a sound design uh a sound design session because if you don't, you're going to this is going to interrupt your creative flow.

And that's the thing with granular synthesis effects or synthesizers. There's a lot of randomness involved. There's some chance involved. But that's what makes this so interesting and so amazing to use because when you find something that works, it really works. outputs presets on like Portal or Thermal or other um effects plugin. Man, it is it's they're really really helpful. This is how I like to browse my uh presets.

I like to kind of I can have the dry wet slider a little push back whether it's 50/50 or even like less so I'm able to compare the wet signal with the dry signal to kind of give me a better idea of how it is um affecting my sound. So, I'm in the delay category again, and we're just going to go through some I'm going to end up here, but it'll be nice to browse around. So, forever delay, let's hear that how that sounds.

Oh, yeah. And to lock it, right click, lock parameter value. So, now as I scroll through each preset, this slider will stay here. Here we go. [Music] That's really cool. I'm going to favorite that. Okay. Try this one out. [Music] Yeah, like that was a little too crazy for me. [Music] That was okay. Wonderland Shimmer. [Music] Yeah. So, I I went through with maybe what three or four presets and I only liked one and I made sure to favorite it because um I could already see myself wanting to use Forever Delay for another moment where I used Portal.

But the ones that I went through that I was kind of like whatever about um I just like moved on and just kept going through presets until I found one that I really really liked. Okay, so let's tweak a preset. This is going to be the last best way to use Portal, which is uh just teaching you how to tweak this preset and like knowing which knobs the most important ones to mess around with and how to get the most out of tweaking.

So, um I have chosen this preset to mess around with called unstable shimmer. This is how it sounds on its own. [Music] Great. So, what we can hear already is that there's definitely a chorus on it, which is getting us that like thick kind of lush sound. We have some delay happening right here. And then we have all these crazy controls going on. So, what I like to do if if I'm going to tweak is I like to first turn off my LFO so that I'm able to focus much better on what else is going on.

So, all we're going to do is that we're going to affect three knobs in the grain control section. We're going to affect the offset, the density, and the size. So, the knob I like to focus on first is a density knob. And what the density knob is doing is that it's it's messing with your the grains of the sound. And what a grain is is uh imagine getting your your sound and chopping it up into little slices, little micro sounds.

Each of those micro sound units is considered a grain. So, the fact that we have 150 milliseconds, that's that's how long or big um is our grain. So, uh, 15. Well, this is how it sounds. I'm going to increase it and decrease it. [Music] All right. So, in this preset, it's not making that big of a difference. So, let's see what else we can do with it. So, now we're going to focus on the size. And what the size is, it's affecting the size of the grain.

So right now we are set at 1.5 to one. So we've taken our grain and we've extended it um by 0.5 and what's what that is going to end up doing is that it's going to have these grains blending together. And then if we bring it down below one one these grains are going to feel more choppy because we decreased the ratio of each grain. So we'll hear it now. We'll start choppy and then we'll push it up. Let's bring up the slider to hear it better.

[Music] So, in this case, when we have it below 1:1, like really low, like 1 to eight, uh, it starts to sound like a cleaner signal, when we bring it up above, you start to really hear those grains collide and create like this texture where it's hard to tell where there's like a beginning and an end. I actually like it shorter. So, we'll try it out here. Let's go to one to four. That sounded pretty cool. And then offset.

What offset is going to be doing? Well, in this case, uh let me here I'm going to bring it back up to up here because when uh your size is above one to one ratio, that's where offset really makes a difference because what's happening is that right now we have eight grains that are being played at the same time. But they're being played at exactly the same time. So we don't really get much use out of it. But when we offset it, we're getting a little bit of a swing.

So now all those eight grains are going to be slightly staggered depending on how much you stagger it. And you really really hear that when your grain size is above one one. So let's hear this again. [Music] So it's kind of like getting d-tuned and stuff, but when it's at zero, [Music] sounds less duned. [Music] But I want to have my size I want to four. Great. So now uh I'm liking how that sounds. Let's bring back in our LFOs.

So this LFO here is going to be uh causing the pan to go left and right. So we get a nice uh stereo field action going on. this LFO is affecting the offset which isn't going to be making big too big of a difference because our grain size is below one one and because of that um our grains aren't going to be um colliding too much. [Music] Cool. Uh and then let's turn on this grain delay. So, we're adding an additional delay before it hits his chorus, which will be delayed again.

This might be pretty crazy, but let's hear it. Yeah, I don't I don't really like that. So, last thing I want to do before I like save this plugin or save this preset is adjust the dry wet knob to an area that I really uh like. [Music] And let's let's uh set this in a place that we like to adjust this lower. Cool. So, I'm pretty happy with that. So, um I'm not going to just move on and forget this. I want to save this so that I can bring it up again.

Um, so, so this is how I like to name my presets. Uh, so this is like a stab. And then I'm going to name it something. I will name it, let's see, chill. Now, I've been using the word chill way too much. Um, how about laidback delay? Okay. So now um in my user I have something called laidback delay from me. So let's hear our sound with the preset that we just made in context of our whole loop. This will be fun. [Music] Nice.

That was really fun. Of course, the craziness in my head is telling me that this chord I want to layer it with something with a bit of like maybe a little bit tall key. Just something in the upper upper like that something the high end to just give it a bit more bite. I think it's a little bit too dull. Um, but that's just me being hyper critical. But this was fun. Regardless, uh, please download this preset. Um, click that link and and just have fun with it.

Okay, those are the five best ways to use Portal by Output. And if you don't have this plugin yet, go please get it. It's amazing. Click the link in the description below to learn more about it.