Sugar Bytes Graindad is a new granular effect plugin powered by a mighty grain engine with embedded FXs and an innovative harvester modulation engine.
The Berlin company Sugar Bytes stands for crazy instrument and effect plugins with a lot of innovative ideas. You won’t find bread and butter or more of the same here. This is about plugins that enable endless wild sound experiments.
Something the company doesn’t offer much in their plugins is granular synthesis. One of my favorites when it comes to synthesis technologies. That is now changing massively. With Graindad, Sugar shows a very playful granular effect plugin with fascinating ideas
Sugar Bytes Graindad
Graindad is a new granular effects plugin (mac/win) with many very playful ideas. The grain engine, the heart of every granular plugin, can play back up to 64 grains simultaneously in different unique ways. Nice, you can manipulate the existing audio files or use the process in real-time with live audio. Clever, you can record in sync to your host clock or even trigger it directly via MIDI.
The engine can be tweaked using 12 main parameters giving you creative tools, including looping, stuttering, time stretching, glitch, pitch shifting, reversing, or harmonizing. And of course also parameters like density, grain size, position, pitch, and more.
The highlight of the plugin is the dual modulation engine. On the one hand, you get a classic mod system with LFOs, envelopes, modulators, step sequencers, and more. Modulations that are known from every synthesizer and today also from effects. But Sugar Bytes goes beyond that and offers a Harvester Modulation engine.
Harvester Modulation
The Harvester is a newly developed modulation system where you can modulate all 12 main controls at once. You have to think of it as a field where parameters are scattered and harvester captures them at different points. And just like in real life, you can also drive along paths that you have drawn before and modulate several parameters at the same time
Sugar Bytes goes more in detail:
The Harvester modulates all 12 main controls at once. The distance between the Harvester and parameter objects defines the modulation depth. The parameter objects have “moons” that can be recorded as automation or randomized for additional layers of motion. On the Auto-Pilot Page, the Harvester can move between 12 breakpoints, which can also be triggered by MIDI notes for performative control.
An exciting concept to modulate parameters. There is plenty of stuff to discover including morphing.
Effects
Furthermore, Sugar Bytes added a pretty impressive multi-effects engine inside its granular processor. You can find here classic effects like multimode filters, reverbs, shimmer, delays, flanger, chorus, and flangers. Dry/Wet controls make it easy to blend filter sweeps into the image or use the bandpass as a peaking EQ to emphasize certain frequencies.
Sugar Bytes also has built-in many ways to randomize parameters. Okay, that’s nothing extraordinary with SB releases anymore. Of course, Graindad also includes many presets created by professional sound designers.
Sugar Bytes likes to take more time for the next release. In this case, too, but then can be almost certain that there will be another highlight. It looks like a super exciting plugin with a lot of sound options. Especially the interface, which looks very intuitive, makes you want to discover it right away.
Sugar Bytes Graindad is available now for 99€ and runs as a VST2, VST3, AU, and AAX on macOS (Intel + native Apple Silicon) and Windows.
More information here: Sugar Bytes
Available at my partner
Be the first to comment