Minimal Audio Lucid is a new, mighty granular FX plugin packed with deep sound design features that stay in key with your music.
Granular synthesis has been a major trend in music production for several years. Many use it to create ambient drones or textures from simple sounds. You can also use it more subtly to bring life and sonic playfulness to existing tracks.
Granular is often placed within an atonal context because users tend to use it too much. Some plugins, however, try to squeeze out more musical soul. One recent example is the new Lucid plugin from Minimal Audio, which combines granular processing with scales, keeping everything in the key signature.
Minimal Audio Lucid
Lucid is a new granular FX plugin for macOS and Windows. Among the vast array of granular plugins available, the new Minimal Audio Lucid is certainly one of the most comprehensive. It’s more of a grain laboratory than a one-trick pony.
Instead of loading samples as with the Minimal Audio Current Synthesizer, audio flows through the plugin here. It sparks the granular clouds on your tracks.
The plugin consists of two levels: the granular engine and a dedicated FX page. The granular engine comes with two distinct sample playback engines: stretch and scrub.
Two Engines: Stretch & Scrub
Stretch time-stretches your audio and freezes it, with playback speed synced to your BPM, while scrub lets you move freely through the captured audio. The latter allows you to automate the playback position.
Two different approaches are used here. The first is better for synced rhythms and glitches; the second works great for live or if you want to customize deeply to your track.
Plus, you can modify the stretch retrigger rate and use spray to randomly offset where the granular starts. This basically extends the range where the granular processor is applied to your sound.
With the timeline sync option, you can keep the stretching, freezing, and playback locked to your session’s tempo.
On the left side, you can dive deeper into the granular processor and set its behavior to fit your desired effect. Classic parameters such as grain rate, grain size, shape, and more are available. This ranges from slight stuttering and glitches to texture-like results.
Grains In Key With Your Music
A highlight of the new Minimal Audio Lucid is the built-in scale-locking function, which automatically retunes every single grain to whatever key and scale you’ve dialed in. Both the stretch and scrub engines have a dedicated key section on the right side.
Here, you can set the key, re-pitch and detune it, and choose from various scales to lock. Once done, the granular process follows your track musically.
At first, you might think it’s just marketing fluff, but the difference between scaled granularity and not is impressive. It sounds much more harmonious and beautiful than the other way around, although I love atonality and noise too. They go two steps further with the arp and chord mode.
In arp mode, the grains go on an arpeggio trip and step through the active intervals (defined by the scale) one at a time. And in chord mode, every grain plays all active intervals at the same time. You can also add randomization to make it more unpredictable and wild.
The arpeggiator option really shines with static sounds or vocals. It turns a classic sound into something musical and evolving.
Grain Shaping Level 2
The core of the Lucid plugin is a granular engine that we just saw. On top, it also includes three powerful per-grain effects for detailed shaping.
On the left, a multimode grain filter shapes each grain with various filtering colors, drive, and modulation. From classic low-pass and high-pass to more unusual modes like morph, comb, phaser, or allpass, everything is onboard.
Then, the dynamic grain imager pulls stereo movement and depth straight out of the grains themselves and distributes them in the stereo field.
Six modes, each with a different personality, offer plenty of customization. Pair it with the arp or chord that works extremely well.
The third and final grain shaper is the grain delay, also locked to the scale engine. It envelopes the grain swarm with shimmer, space, and arpeggiated movement.
Modulation
Part of Minimal Audio Lucid is also a flexible modulation engine, which some may recognize from other plugins by the company. It includes bendable LFOs, curve generators (aka function generators), and an envelope follower.
An envelope follower is particularly useful in a plugin like this because it reacts to the audio you feed in and generates modulation from it. You can route these modulators to virtually any parameter for extra movement and depth, even the scaling function.
Lost track of all modulations? Don’t worry. Open the modulation matrix, and you’ll be back in focus on what and how modulation is applied.
It also features an animator pad that completes the modulation engine. It lets you control multiple parameters at once through an animated XY performance interface. It’s a shame that you can’t draw paths for the animator to then follow.
Proper Refinements
At the beginning, I said that Minimal Audio Lucid consists of two parts. Beyond the granular engine itself, which is pretty extensive, Lucid also includes a fully-fledged multi-FX processor with eight swappable effects.
You’ll find a frequency shifter, multiband compressor, chorus, distortion, filter, EQ, delay, and reverb. Each FX unit has a solid set of parameters, making them versatile.
Clever: they have their own mixing controls: input, output, and mix, so you can perfectly dose each effect.
Just like the granular engine, the effects are also fully automatable with the modulators. Traditional, more static refinements are possible, but so are hyper-dynamic ones, where an FX like reverb gains more impact the longer the process runs.
Neat: you can decide whether the granular processor goes pre- or post effects.
Sound Design With Minimal Audio Lucid
The developers ship Lucid with 350 professionally created presets available in a browser with searchable tags. Each preset also comes with performance-ready macros that are instantly mapped to the X/Y pad.
As mentioned earlier, many granular processors tend to create atonal soundscapes. They give you rich textures but forget the musicality. Lucid brings the fun of granular processing into harmonious concepts thanks to its scale lock function.
It works particularly well with vocals or melodies. In “one-trick pony”-style granular processors, you must use it subtly so as not to clutter the whole thing with it.
Here, with the scale function on, you can increase the proportion without losing musicality, which is pretty neat. You can even bring musicality into noise.
And since everything is synced to the timeline on top, the same applies to pads and other sounds. They stay on point and don’t drift out of your set pattern.
Minimal Audio Lucid First Impression
Lucid joins the almost endless stream of granular processors released in recent years. Since many share the same features, you have to highlight the extras that set it apart. In this case, that’s clearly the scale function, along with its chord modes, that makes it shine.
This unlocks musicality in granular synthesis, which often isn’t the case. The per-grain FX or deep modulation engine shouldn’t be underestimated, as it puts everything on an endless rollercoaster ride.
For some, it might be another granular processor; those who work a lot with melodic content will be very happy with it. I will be adding some short video clips about Lucid soon.
Minimal Audio Lucid is now available for an introductory price of $79, down from $129. It runs as a VST3, AU, and AAX plugin on macOS (native Apple Silicon + Intel) and Windows.
More information here: Minimal Audio
Available from my partner
I cant work with so much latency