Cart
Loading...
×
Feed After Midnight: Endorphin.es Evil Pet Overview
Granular Sampling + Synthesis in Pedal Form
I imagine that when most people think of granular, they see it as a fluid, textured, futuristic technology. Grains would spill like pinpricks of light, swirling in a universe of infinite possibility, responding to gesture control and elegant touchscreens. Not here, not with the thrillingly named Evil Pet from Endorphin.es. The Evil Pet granular processor is a riot in pink and clacky old keyboard buttons. The metal knobs with tractor tyre grips suggest a nuclear bunker more than a spacecraft flight deck, and the screen looks like something you'd play Pong on. It's loud in looks and has some serious pedal vibes for a desktop box.
However, granular can often be a bit opaque, with controls over things like mood and spatial disturbance, which don't really communicate what it's all about. Evil Pet, on the other hand, throws up all the parameters onto the front panel with grabbable knobs in no-nonsense language in what looks like the most accessible granular project yet.
Granular: a Quick Recap
Granular sampling/synthesis is a concept in which we take a tiny piece of sound and, through the manipulation of pitch, duration, size, position, spread, and density, we can create new sounds. The language can get a bit elastic, but you could see these pieces of sound as a microsound, particles of sound, or perhaps more commonly as grains. The controls on a granular synth set parameters and boundaries around the generation of grains from the source audio. The slow production of grains can pull a steady tone apart, whereas the fast generation can extract a drone texture from a single hit.
So, you get a bunch of tiny sounds, pulled from a sample, that can be played at any speed, any order and any pitch, independently, from single moments to whole clouds of grains like a swarm of particles. You could see it as the individual sound from every stone being crunched under your feet as you walk along a gravel path. Through clever manipulation we can shape the result into textures and musical tones that have a very different quality to any other form of synthesis. This is what our Evil Pet is all about.
Sourcing / Recording
To kick things off, Evil Pet needs some source material to work with, and it has a few different ways to acquire it. There's an SD card slot onto which you can stick a bunch of samples. Another option is to use the inbuilt FM radio. Often, in granular, the source material feels like the least important element. You just need something to pull grains from. Radio is perfect for this as it can come up with noise, or random music and spoken word that brings a character to the textures you'll be generating. For something more intentional, you can use the line inputs on the back or the little microphone built into the front panel.
Evil Pet works by capturing audio into the buffer. The buffer is enormous and can hold up to 10 minutes of mono audio. While 10 minutes might sound awesome, it can get a bit unwieldy, but you can easily reduce this to a more manageable size of a few seconds in the menu system. Hit the nice big red record button, and any incoming sound is recorded into the buffer. You see it travelling along the screen until it leaves the buffer on the left edge. The buffer time is not a track length or loop, so if you leave it recording, sound will constantly pass through it until you stop recording, leaving you with whatever is still in the buffer.
There is a way to overdub by feeding the buffer is output back into itself, but for the most part, recording into the buffer is a linear process.
However, you don’t have to record, stop, and then manipulate; Evil Pet loves to process whatever is coming through, just like an effects pedal. It can be a synth or texture maker, bit reducer, shimmer reverb or weird delay machine. Granular opens up all sorts of interesting possibilities.
Getting Granular
Whatever you're trying to use it for, all the granular action happens on the first four of top row of knobs. Every knob has a secondary function, so you're looking at about eight controls that shape the synthesis, and the rest are modulation and effects that we'll get to in a minute.
The first two knobs are Position/Spread and Size/Cloud. These produce a bracketed space on the screen, marking a section of the sample, in which the grains are produced and live their often very short lives. We tend to see granular as these pinpricks on the screen, and it's easy to assume these are the little grains, when in fact they're playheads playing back a slice of the audio. So, when you set the size of the grain, you are not changing the size of the playhead dot, but how long it plays for or how much of the sample it plays (because time is relative). On the screen we see this as the movement of that dot, of that playhead. Size can take things from tiny moments to long sections of playback either forwards or backwards on a single turn.
While the Position knob dictates the position of the bracket on the screen, it's the Cloud control that dictates the size of the brackets and so the space in which grains are generated and travel. Using a single knob for two controls can be frustrating when switching between them with the Shift key, but Evil Pet uses the brightness of its LED to show where the previous value was, which is very helpful. The Spread control adjusts the stereo spread of grains to increase the stereo field or bring things back to centre.
Moving to the right, we have the Pitch control, which sets the octave range of grain playback, whether that's quantized or not and to which scale. The Detune control randomises the pitch of a grain while still following the quantization.
Then we have the Grains knob, which sets the speed at which the grain playheads are generated. At 12 o'clock, there's always a single grain, and you get more the further you turn right, while turning left increases the probability of random occurrences. And finally, we have the Shape control, which looks after the envelopes applied to the grain to prevent clicking and alter the sound's character.
Effects + Modulation
Effects are a vital part of the granular experience, particularly reverb, and here we have a few different algorithms combined with a Shimmer control that introduces pitch shifting and echoes to give that other-worldly dreamscape effect. We have a separate Tail control to adjust the reverb's decay or feedback, from sudden to galactic. The secondary control is Tone, which is essentially a tilt EQ to push or pull the brightness.
The other effect is the Saturator, which is a bit misleading because it can be a few quite different effects. Along with the distortion, sample-rate reduction, and bit-crushing, it can also be a chorus or a flanger. And then there's this fascinating Feedback mode where the granulated output is fed back into the buffer to create layers of drama, echoes and potentially self-oscillation.
There's also a filter, with cutoff and resonance annoyingly on the same knob, which has multiple modes, including a DJ-style low-to-high pass.
Modulation comes in the form of three LFOs with shape and speed controls, which can be assigned by pressing a button and twisting whatever you want to control. It can also be an envelope follower, taking its shape from the incoming audio. A simple ADSR envelope is on hand for when you're playing it like a synth.
So What Would You Use it For?
The Evil Pet has two main uses: it can be a synthesizer you play with a keyboard, or an effects pedal you plug an instrument into and process in real time.
As a synthesizer you are more likely to take a sample and work on it with the granular engine to find a tone or texture that you can then pitch about with a keyboard. It has 8 voices of polyphony and can actually sound one other voice with the Play button on the front panel. The Play button is great for drones or making sounds when you don't have a keyboard to hand. Inside the machine there's also a virtual analog engine with some regular waveforms that you can use to bolster the granular stuff, give it more of a firm melodic footing, which can help it from descending into atonal chaos.
As an effects processor, you can latch it into Record and Play so that as you play your instrument the audio is being constantly granulated. There's a Mix knob to help blend your sounds and a Bypass button to pull yourself out of the madness. It can produce simple creative effects like delay, reverses, shimmers, as well as extreme washes of jumbled up tape and wild pitch shifts. The only problem is that you’re stuck with your hands on your instrument when you want to be fiddling with the front panel.
Comparisons + Conclusions
I'm not sure why they named it the Evil Pet, but perhaps it’s because it comes across as much less refined than something like the Tasty Chips GR-1. The GR-1 has twice the polyphony, can generate far more grains and has more of a spaceship flight-deck vibe. It's an offline playground though and doesn't have the pedal-style immediacy. Neither does the 1010Music Lemondrop, which also feels immensely fiddly next to the exciting front panel of the Evil Pet.
The best pedal comparison would be the similarly priced Dobbo Granular FX. It has all the immediacy but pulls it into a much smaller space and sheds all of the offline processing that the Evil Pet can offer. It's more intentionally a pedal and feels like an advanced delay with added weirdness. If you don't want to get into the details, then this is a great option.
I think what the Evil Pet projects is a sense of fiddling and immersive ponderings. You're not going to be able to put it down. You'll be endlessly pushing those grains around into different configurations and exploring countless possibilities. It's not refined or overly complex, instead revelling in the grungy edges to produce beautifully saturated universes of sound, whether through thoughtful manipulation or spontaneous creativity.
The information below is required for social login
Sign In
Create New Account