5. Tasty Chip Electronics GR-1 Granular Synthesizer
The granular synth that has caused the most attention in recent months was probably the GR-1 from Tasty Chips Electronics.. The GR-1 is a hardware polyphonic granular instrument that is powered by Raspberry Pi3. With up to 2048 grains (128 grains per voice x 16 voices) in parallel, it’s a massive polyphonic synth.
It features a 32-bit mixing and HiFi stereo DAC for edition, a 7″ full colour display, support full MIDI , USB sticks/disks, USB audio interfaces and keyboards (MIDI and PC). On top it’s possible to connect CV interfaces for the integration with modular Synthesizers.
The GR-1 is especially well accepted by the musicians because its interface is very simple and hands-on designed. For each parameter of the granular engine there is a knob and so sounds are very easy to manipulate. It’s also possible to connect a MIDI controller to the device to get access to all parameters. Also a nice feature is that the GR-1 can be operated in a standalone without using a MIDI keyboard (4 note chords with the buttons and sliders).
Samples can be uploaded in multiple formats via USB or sampled directly using USB sound chards. The device can handle 32 sample file of 10 MB (2 min) and features an internal drive of 4 GB. Additional USB drives can be connected at the backside. Another cool feature is support for MPE (MIDI Polyphonic Expression) that allows you to play in a very expressive way the GR-1 Synthesizer.
The Tasty Chips Electronics GR-1 can be named the king of granular hardware Synthesizers with a clear conscience. For a list price of 849€, musicians get here a very high performance Synthesizer with granular power that musicians only knows from software products. All this is built-in a nice and straightforward designed interface that invites everyone to play with granular synthesis.
If you are an absolute lover of granular samplers/synthesis and have always dreamed of a hardware device that can do that, you can’t miss the GR-1 from Tasty Chips Electronics.
More information here: Tasty Chips Electronics
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 🙂