Amidst many granular tools out there, Scatter is nicely focused – intuitive controls plus elegant pitch modulation options. It can be a shimmer reverb as much as a granular cloud effect, marrying grain soundscapes with classic digital pitch effects.
This is a compact, well-chosen architecture:
- Up to 64 random grains
- Visualizer for grains
- Chromatic / octave / fifth and minor/major transposition pitch modes with optional randomization
- Pitch modulation: up, down, both directions
- Grain reverse and freeze
- Feedback control
- Space reverb
There’s an easy, resizable interface, MIDI control and automation, and native Apple Silicon support on the Mac side.
New from SoundGhost; intro price £39.00. AU/VST3/64-bit – no AAX.
https://soundghost.net/product/scatter/
It’s really cute what they’re doing – also need to check out their Texturize plug-in. This almost feels like a baby version of Arturia’s Efx Fragments, which I reviewed already:
There seems to be a niche out there for a granular plug-in with tuning support – that sounds like a design project. But I suspect you’d mostly leave this in octaves mode anyway.
They even both have a blue-green color scheme. Fragments is far deeper; I could honestly see using both side-by-side for different uses. (Sometimes you want more controls and a broader palette, as in Fragments; sometimes you want quickly dialed-in effects and the shimmery stuff as here. It’s always nice to have a few granular tools.)
Speaking of “I never have too many granular tools,” it seems Emergence the name-your-own price Mac-only granular tool is also nearing a 1.0 release. Here’s a preview of those presets:
And even more pitch-shifted echoes:
Grain me!