Slowslicing has just released a FREE granular and spectral synthesis plugin called Phasereplicant, and it’s available only for Windows as a VST3 plugin format.
Personally, granular synthesis is one of my absolute favorite types of synthesis since it drives you on such a fantastic journey of sound design possibilities.
It’s your gateway to a new sonic realm of ethereal soundscapes, particle-based noises, and all sorts of good stuff.
The words ‘Granular’ and ‘Spectral’ together feel like a wedding made in heaven.
Phasereplicant combines the two worlds in a single plugin, which splits the audio into 256 bands and performs granular synthesis on each band individually.
The GUI is split into four parts according to their specific functions.
On the left, you will find a funny interactive animated illustration of two heads resembling the number of bars of phase processing you want to apply to the sample. When they are fully separated, you are processing the whole sample.
In a drop-down menu, you can select whether to set all phases to zero, hence keeping magnitude the same, or randomize phase. These options allow you to make the audio sound smeared and blurry while retaining the harmony of the source.
At the center of the display is a drawable and resizable graph to edit the individual granular controls of the 256 separate bands like Grain Spacing, Wave Spacing, Hold Spacing, and Attack Spacing.
The button found beneath the graph called Process Granular triggers the spectral granular processing.
Interestingly, there is a live granular section as well!
This is found on the right of the interface, where a creepy creature with four eyes resides. Each eye performs the same controls found in the aforementioned granular section but in real-time.
You have access to the same sets of controls of Grain, Wave, Attack, and Hold, with the added option to reverse the grains.
Finally, at the bottom of the plugin, you can see a rough visualization of the sample’s waveform, with controls over the Gain and Start Time of the sample playback.
The icing on the cake of this plugin is the drag-and-drop functionality into the DAW host. By simply clicking and dragging the displayed waveform you are effectively exporting the rendered and resampled version of your original audio.
While not a piece of cake for everyone (sorry for the word pun :D), the interactive GUI of the plugin makes for a rewarding sound design adventure.
Phasereplicant is available as a VST3 plugin format for Windows.
Download: Phasereplicant (FREE)
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Last Updated on August 22, 2023 by Tomislav Zlatic.
