granulate EVERYTHING transcript

Today I'm going to show you a bunch of possibilities of the stuff you can make with granulator 3. If you didn't know, granulator 3 is a free download in Live 12 suite if you go to the packs tab and just look for granulator 3. So granulator is a type of sampler that lets you play small loops of a sample at a time. So I'm going to drag in a vocal from my friend Maian. >> And once you drag it in, you'll see this little bar in the center.

So this is the position of the sample we're going to play. So if I play C3 on my keyboard, you'll hear it's looping this small segment. And this is defined by the grain size. And then there's the position which you can drag with your mouse >> or you can move this knob by itself. And there's three different modes to this. So classic will have the grains overlap with each other to kind of provide a consistent sustained sound. >> Then we have loop mode which the grains will not overlap with each other in this case.

So this whole bar in the middle is a dynamic modulation kind of bar which will change depending on which knob you have selected. So if I select grain size, you'll see there's a reverse option just for the loop mode. So this is the chance that the grains will play in reverse. >> Then there's this cloud mode which has multiple instances of grain stacked against each other which you can define with this density knob. >> [singing] >> And this will get you like the most sustained type sound.

So there's a lot of possibilities you can get with each of these modes. And the way that most people might want to play granulator is with their keyboard. So you might want to be like So by default when you press notes on your keyboard, each key will transpose the sample, which I wouldn't always want when I'm playing with granulator. Although, if you did want to play this as like a pad instrument kind of thing, you can get a tuner and see what C3 is.

And since it's D, I'm just gonna pitch it down. And I think this cloud sounds a little bit too concentrated at one point. So, there's this variation knob you'll see kind of isolated in the middle. And you'll see these orange knobs pop up, which defines how much these parameters will vary when we turn up this variation knob. So, if I turn this up, [music] so right now it's only varying the position. So, I might bring that down a little bit.

Uh, I might turn up the grain size. So, the grain size will vary. And then TR is transposition. So, if you turn this up a little bit, you'll get this kind of cool chorus effect, which is only in cloud mode. And volume might also be cool. So, I'm going to turn this up. And the spread knob gives a different pitch to the right and left ears, which creates a stereo effect. sounds really icy in my opinion. It's also interesting to see how this sounds in like other modes like classic.

So, you can also actually have this glide if you turn on mono and then turn up this little glide knob over here. So, if you hold a note >> [music] [music] >> But if I'm honest, most of the time I use granulator. I don't want to use it for sampling one certain part of a sample. I'm going to go ahead and duplicate this track. And if I'm in G major, that means I'm in E minor. So I'm going to transpose this down to three.

And with this dynamic modulation bar, you'll see if you click on the transpose knob, you'll see key is turned up to 100, which means it's going to change the pitch on every keyboard note you press. So, we can bring that down to zero and every note we press will be the same. And that's not the only knob that has key modulation on it. Filter frequency also has it. So, I'm going to turn that to zero so it doesn't change the filter frequency on each note press.

But my absolute favorite thing to use with granulator is the position knob with the key turned up. So you'll see this is C3 in the same position that it normally is. But if I move it up, it's kind of like a more ethereal version of simpler slice mode in a way except it doesn't slice by transient. It just plays different parts of the sample in increments. It's not exactly clear how to quantify how much the key moves the position.

So, I usually vary how much it plays with it just to see what kind of variations I'll get. I'm going to make this less releasy. And with that glide I showed you earlier, you can turn that on again. And instead of gliding between pitch, it will glide between slices. And you'll hear that grain size plays a huge role in how often it's changing which position you hear. So I like to go back to cloud mode in this case. So, if we turn down the grain size, you'll hear it's changing the position kind of faster.

[music] I kind of want this to be a higher octave, so I'm going to hold shift on my keyboard and then up. This is kind of a cool way to get vocal chops, too. Like you'll hear that kind of pattern when it goes in between the slices. [music] And I forgot to record that, so I just pressed the square button to have it record for me. [music] I didn't really like how this one transitioned. So, I'm going to play with some of these other slices.

[music] [music] And even though we have the key not affecting transposition, you'll see that note pitchbend will still change the transposition. So, if you go to the MP tab and click on the note, you'll see this little bar that you can just make a little automation for. So, we'll just go an octave down. [snorts] And keep in mind when you change the transposition that will also affect the grain size. So if you have the transposition at zero the grains will play at 76.1 milliseconds.

But if you have it at 12 semmit tones up it's going to play at half the grain size. Might actually have it do like a little bit of like a pitch up. And that's some things I love to do with vocals specifically. But obviously vocals aren't the only kind of sound source that exists. like granulator can work with all kinds of different sounds. So, I have a melodic sound design session that I recorded in my last video, right?

Just going to drag that in and set the transpose to zero. And then I'm going to take it back to classic mode. So, when you throw in giant sound design sessions, the slicing possibilities are endless. And you can kind of get cool like botanical type textures. And sometimes you might want something like this to play to the tempo of your track, but the grand size doesn't have a sync option. So a kind of hack that you can do is highlight say like a quarter note for example, and you'll see at the bottom left of your screen that it will tell you the duration in milliseconds.

So you'll see it says 408. So I can type in the grain size to be 408 and it'll perfectly match to be quarter notes. And something I kind of like to do just for like a little bit of like a cool transient, you have this built-in modulator envelope that you can use to kind of control any of these knobs. So, there's this shape knob here, which by default is at 50%, and this can kind of control how the individual grains sound.

In classic mode, if you turn it down, it'll make it pointier downwards ramp type grain shape. And if you turn it up, it will kind of do the opposite ramp up type shape. I think it's kind of cool. If you have a kind of plucky envelope shape, you can do a negative modulation on shape. So it will go from pointy to regular. And I think this pairs nicely if you also do it with grain size. So it goes like small grain size to normal grain size.

So and right now it's at a really long decay time. So I'm just going to make it maybe 1 second. [music] Just going to play with different slices. See what sounds the coolest. >> [music] >> I really like to get this multiband compression preset of multiband dynamics, which is kind of like a nice glue I prefer way more than OTT. [music] Maybe play with the time a little bit. [music] Might even duplicate it. [music] Oh, that one's cool.

Just going to get quick drum beat down. [music] I kind of want to have like a subbase match the pattern. So, there's a stock hip-hop subbase preset that I really like. I'm just going to go ahead and like get a quick recording of it and then command B. And I'm going to duplicate this granulator and get rid of the multiband compression and just drag this new hip-hop subbase on it. So, and just catch the end here. And I really like this kick type preset on Corpus a lot to kind of make a subbase boomier.

I'm just going to pitch it down to E. That's the subbase. And let's hear this in context. [music] I'm going to duplicate this same granulator from earlier. Transpose this up two octaves. And we can kind of go a little goofy with it. So, if you turn on your plus and automation arm, you can record automations you do inside your granulator. That was instantly kind of crazy. [music] I also want to do a little fill of this vocal from May earlier.

I'm just going to quickly reample from this track and just do a quick little might try another one from this May pack so it doesn't sound too much like Chipmunks. Oh yes, let's do the pointy with the shape. Oh, this is super fun with the glide. All right, this is a long session. I can just open this take lane, then press B, see if any of these are sampleable. I'm just going to quickly take this part and see if this will be a cool fill and maybe just reverse it [music] and get variations by doing option shift and then dragging.

I know not everyone's a splice user, but there's something I've been doing to kind of recycle splice loops to be your own thing. I'm just going to filter for major loops and make sure they're all transposed to G major. keep me [music] alive. [music] >> So, I like to take these samples and I think it's really fun to either get an external LFO or the built-in LFO and have that modulate the grain size and even the position.

And I haven't really talked about the scan yet, but this is basically a knob that automates the position for you. So it just controls how fast it scrubs through the sample. So if you have it at one times, it's going to play at the rate of the sample. And having this in conjunction with the LFO modulation on the grand size and position kind of gives it a cool like glitchy effect. >> [music] >> Maybe might try it at like 0.25.

[music] Something that's also cool about the granulator LFO is that you can have it be different on the right and left ear. So you can basically in this case have the position and grain size be different on the right and left ears. [music] I think it'd be also be cool to get some quick texture from this. So, I think I'm going to play around in session view and get a new granulator. And then you can pick any drum kit.

I like decap stock drum kits. And something that I think is really fun to do is go to the clips tab and filter for drum clips. And it really doesn't matter what you pick. You can just drag a bunch into session view. We just want some variations of patterns. And what you're hearing from the previews are the sounds from the kits themselves, but they're going to play in the patterns of the decap kit that we have here. And once you have a good variation, you can highlight all of these and press shift tab on your keyboard.

And you can open this launch section and you can have these clips switch between each other while they're playing. So if you turn on follow action and then set it to unlin, these will all play for a bar each. And and I'm going to turn this to play quarter notes at a time. And then if we switch this to any, it's going to randomly pick which clip will play next. So, if I have legato off, it's just going to play the beginning each time it switches to a new loop.

[music] And we want it to be continuous. So, we turn legato. [music] And then there's this trick I learned from Nicholas Theer's YouTube channel where if you turn on this I/IO, you can instantly resample input from any track that's playing in live. So, this is nice for like live generative performance. I'm going to have the source be our decap kit. and then post effects just because I want to turn this off. What's really cool is you can get an LFO and then turn it on square mode and then maybe have it reample every two bars.

Have the shape skewed. So it will just basically press the capture for us every two bars. And I'm going to put down a MIDI note. So if I only have this playing [music] and then this is where scan is really fun. So if you have the scan at one, [music] you can hear it kind of play as normal. But if you have the scan set to like say 0.25, it kind of have this cool texture effect. I might also have the LFO mapped to the grain size.

[music] It might also be cool to map it to the shape. [music] And I want to be able to layer my drum beat in this track with this texture. So, I'm going to reample from a granulator track. I wanted to prioritize showing a bunch of techniques over making a full structured track for this video, but be sure to stick around for videos where I do make full tracks. If you like these techniques, consider getting my Max Devices and Ableton racks.

And thank you Ableton for sponsoring this