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.

https://cdm.link/2022/03/efx-fragments-is-a-granular-processing-loaded-with-modulation-in-latest-arturia-fx-addition/

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!