1. Bastl Instruments microGranny 2.5
The first granular instrument comes from the Czech Republic and is one of the cheapest. The Bastl Instruments microGranny 2.5 is a battery-powered monophonic granular sampler which can be purchased in a built and DIY kit version.
It has a built-in microSD card slot that can read & save samples and store up to 60 presets in 10 banks. One point that makes the sound a bit more special is the small bitrate. The microGranny can play samples only in 8/16-bit 22050Hz mono or record samples in 8bit via the line input or onboard microphone. It has also a good number of sound parameters with which you can edit sounds in different ways: start & end point, sample rate (tuned or free run), crush and envelope (attack release).
Via the MIDI input, users have also full external control over the parameters of the microGranny, can play individual grains by different keys or transpose the samples. Due of the Arduino based technology, advanced musicians can hack or expand it.
For a price of +/- 179€ the microGranny 2.5 is a granular sampler / Synthesizer that offers a lot of features, has a very own sound character and is on top very portable.
More information here: Bastl Instruments
Technically, Symbolic sound Kyma should be in it
Yes! A pacarana or paca are still the most powerful granular synthesizers on this planet. And the symbolic sound implementation of granular synthesis sounds very good because of the technical background they have and how the algorithms are implemented on a real DSP plattform.
What about Critter and Guitari Organelle?
Maybe a good time to update this overview
Lemondrop (1010music) is a small but powerful hardware grainsynth
yes, sorry the list is from 2018 🙂