Since watching the classic episode of American edu-tainment cartoon series The Magic School Bus, in which the ineffable Ms. Frizzle shrinks her class of inspired youngsters and embarks on a trip into the human body to study a student's battle with sickness, the microscopic world has seemed both elusive and enticing. With the class's embodied frame of reference so radically altered by this magical manipulation of scale, innumerable wonders became close at hand, readily available for exploration, discovery, and careful consideration. Bodily systems became cavernous worlds of mysterious danger, coughs threatened inescapable torrents, and blood cells battled a bacterial menace in a dazzling display. Of course, as the credits rolled on another fantastical journey of learning, I was left back in my natural, kid-sized body, daydreaming of the technological capability required to set out on my own exploration beyond natural limits of perception.

While I may never get a trip in the Magic School Bus, my own stumbling into electronic sound practices as an adult has revealed plentiful opportunities for microscopic discovery. Granular synthesis, from its theoretical origins in microsounds and acoustic perception, to its modern day explosion as an entirely possible and in-demand technological wonder, provides us a satisfying shrink-ray perspective for the world of sound. Made possible by developments in digital sound processing and the hardware it demands, as well as the tireless curiosity of countless creative minds in developing their own tools and techniques, musicians captivated by microsound have a vast array of resources readily available for artistic application. With the advancements in power and scale of modern hardware computing, many of these tools are closer at hand than ever before in the form of hardware devices. Our own little Magic School Busses of sonic exploration, hardware granular engines provide hands-on manipulation of the microscopic sound world, paving a path towards new musical formations that focus on uniquely small timescales.

Multigrain Overview

As the latest and greatest granular sampling platform in Eurorack, Multigrain provides a deep well of creative tools for capturing, manipulating, and arranging sonic material. Despite this depth, it is clear that Intellijel has taken great care to balance Multigrain's potential with an interface that is no less understandable, as well as one which rewards the user's practice and study with a seriously expansive set of sound design possibilities. Just beneath the surface of its basic operations, Multigrain reveals plenty of its captivating capabilities, likely to have you enjoying the splendor of smeared and sputtering microsounds in your first few minutes with the device.

Yet, beyond the basics, a lifetime of practice awaits, with every session revealing more creative potential yet unrealized, more musical material yearning to be pulverized and sprinkled into yet another project. Intellijel's manual will be your best guide on this journey, as well as their own video manual content, which is assuredly worth keeping around, replaying, following along, and perhaps sleeping to. But first, the basics. What does this thing do, and how?

Sounds, Scenes, Presets, and Projects

Unlike many hardware granular engines, Multigrain eschews a strict focus on singular sounds and instead insists on its namesake multiplicity. Before we dive into sound parameters, I find it helpful to conceptualize the material of Multigrain, the sonic "stuff we have to work with", best understood through a keen look at its file structure.

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Immediately available when you boot-up the module is a single "Preset", which contains eight slots of "Sounds", each made available for finger-mediated playback by the row of buttons at the bottom of the panel. For each sound slot, two "Scenes" can be saved and smoothly morphed between using the nearby horizontal crossfader, not wholly unlike the beloved scene fader on the ineffable Elektron Octatrack. While the pair of scenes for each sound slot derives audio manipulations from the same source material, they represent saved states for virtually all of Multigrain's parameters, enabling dramatic transformations separated by a single satisfying slide.

The Preset provides the user a primary interface for directly manipulating sounds. With the incredible depth provided by Multigrain's many parameters, its flexibility for addressing and organizing sounds across diverse creative implementations, and the virtually limitless diversity of sound itself, we can already see the immense potential available in a single preset. One sound sixteen ways, eight sounds arranged for each track of a live set, a blank slate ready for live sampling, etc—the possibilities abound. Thankfully, you get FORTY-EIGHT Presets per "Project"... AND UP TO FORTY-EIGHT PROJECTS. Again, Multigrain may move in microsounds, but offers a depth of creative potential worth a lifetime of exploration.

Having laid out the size and shape of Multigrain's immense and well-organized container for cooking up multiplicitous sample soups, we must now turn to its collection of sample mangling parameters—the spoons, ladles, and other implements, if you will. Here, Multigrain is similarly comprehensive. Before embarking on this overview, I'll again insist that the Manual from Intellijel will be your best bet for really learning Multigrain, as will repeated journeys down the rabbit hole of sonic sculpture with module in hand. Presented here is a simplified, if not exactly brief, overview of its functions, with hope it inspires your creative urges to get right into patching Multigrain for yourself.

The Knobby Bits

In the Home Page, the primary interface of Multigrain's multiple layers of panel controls, parameters are marked in black text. Ten knobs and one crossfader with an inline attenuverter control greet us here, offering total control over the most essential parameters for granular processing. The first three knobs from the left side of the top row determine which parts of our audio will be used to generate grains. Start defines a position at which grains will begin, while Wrap defines a window size beyond the starting point wherein one may Scan, which advances the starting point forwards or backwards depending on its position beyond or behind Scan's center position. These position controls alone provide a great deal of flexibility between sputtering one-shot samples with static precision and infinitely small microsounds which meander through a sample in shifting swarms of granularized audio.

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While position knobs define what plays back when a grain is generated, the white-capped knobs, marked Level, Rate, Size, Pitch, Tone, and Shape, adjust how grains are played back. Shape defines the amplitude envelope for each generated grain, with seven discrete choices. Level sets volume, while Tone applies high pass filtering to the right of center, and low pass to the left. Between these relatively simple controls, Rate, Size, and Pitch provide control over the granular engine's playback methodology. On a basic level these controls are simple to understand, with Rate affecting the rate of grain generation, Size affecting grain size from mere samples to about 4 seconds, and Pitch shifting the frequency of these grains. However, greater complexity comes with Multigrain's ability to selectively decouple these pillars of playback from one another using the two buttons between them. Explore tape-like relationships with all parameters linked together, or revel in the digital drama of decoupling these once materially-matched parameters, evoking time-stretched sounds of early samplers, precise clock synchronization, and beyond.

Finally, Blur applies a reverb send amount for both incoming audio and any generated grain. Similar to the Fog control on Intellijel's Sealegs, the Canadian modular masters have shown their understanding that adding reverb is always a nice option to have. Especially within a granular system, this lovely wash of reverberation is essential for creating smoothly morphing tones from otherwise transient-heavy audio, or when skipping around sample slices.

Below the crossfader, Multigrain provides us with a large collection of buttons. The bottom row of eight sound buttons, as mentioned previously, allow for both direct triggering of grains while a button is held, as well as switching between the active sound being adjusted by the panel controls. At the left, convenient navigation buttons like Exit and Clear help us get around and between the multiple panel layouts. Rand provides a number of randomization functions when held, from randomizing all settings of a subsequently pressed sound, or using the ten knob controls to apply random modulation with each new grain, with modulation depth set by each knob acting as an attenuverter control. Similarly, X, Y, and Z buttons define assignable modulation to parameters via the corresponding CV input jacks at the top left of the panel. Thru passes audio from the stereo inputs when engaged, and Latch gives those fingers a rest from manual triggering, freeing up your phalanges for other interventions into your developing sound mass.

Ah, at last, the Crossfader itself! This control morphs between two scenes for each sound, both of which can feature entirely disparate settings. The Scene A and B buttons are used to display which scene is currently active and playing, and can be pressed to activate the panel controls for either, letting you quickly copy over one to the next, change things around, then jam the fader to take your sound on a far-out trip into interstellar sampling madness. Or just apply some reverb. Whatever you're feeling. Importantly, most parameters will interpolate smoothly between states, while discrete parameters like Shape or the Reverse button will be immediately changed when morphing scenes. Control the crossfader via CV with the Morph input, using the small attenuverter to manage depth and polarity while the crossfader itself becomes useful as an offset control for this crucial performance feature.

Other jacks at the top of Multigrain's jampacked panel provide even more opportunities for integrating with your system. Gate acts as a voltage-controlled button press, firing off the active sound in grains, while the Next input moves the playing grain over by one sound. In classic Intellijel fashion, smart normalization between these jacks allows you to both sequence and playback grains with only the Next input, a convenience that proved quite creatively rewarding for my own grainy explorations. Rather than stepping through sounds sequentially, you can also select sounds with CV using the Select input. Finally, two CV outputs, marked A and B, provide a dynamic duo of assignable modulation for sending out to other modules. Depending on your patching needs, you can send the position of the Morph fader as CV, send triggers with each new grain, access the grain envelope directly, track the amplitude of the input or output with an envelope follower, and even directly access the onboard sample and hold used for random modulation. Of course, while you're in no great drought of modulation onboard Multigrain itself, these CV outputs can also be patched directly back into one of the CV inputs on the module, enabling self-patched madness as sounds affect themselves in often inspiring ways.

Beyond the Home Page, an Alternate menu provides access to in-depth 12-TET pitch quantization, rhythmic synchronization of rate via Sync input, and management of sound selection from multiple directories within Multigrain's formidable file structure. An entirely separate Sampling page and Advanced Sampling page, marked in blue text, allows for direct sampling of new sounds from the Stereo inputs, as well as sample preparations, making it easy to get by in most situations without having to create and edit samples off-device. In the sample page, you can also adjust a number of sample related settings, including resampling from Multigrain's outputs. I'll introduce a few creative applications of these two alternate worlds within Multigrain later in this article, but suffice it to say, there's a whole lot going on for the module, providing a truly comprehensive platform for granular experimentation, both on stage and in the studio.

[Above: Multigrain's multiple panel pages provide comprehensive control when you need it.]

Creative Examples

With the basics of Multigrain's features now more or less within our grasp, it's a great time to dive into some creative examples to help inspire your own patch experiments. While these forays into our own patch ideas won't offer a step by step patching guide, I'll attempt to provide enough information so you can try out these ideas on your own Multigrain. Even without a Multigrain available, you may find you are able to craft similar patches within a free virtual patching environment like VCV Rack. This will require a fairly large patch with many modules in order to completely account for Multigrain's vast capabilities, but given the many different ways to use this versatile granular engine, I suggest seeing what you can do with even a partial patch-recreation, as you may find the musical results are rewarding even with mere molecules of this potent audio processor.

Sampling Singular Notes

In our first example, we will cover a simple approach to sampling directly from Multigrain's stereo inputs. Both in order to explore just how far Multigrain can take even simple sounds, and also to make the most of its pitch quantization features, we can focus on samples of single notes. To start, load a new project by pressing Alt and entering the project browser with the Project button, as described in the manual, in order to give us a clean slate of sound slots to work with. Find a pitched instrumental sound that you like—an acoustic instrument, keyboard synthesizer, or even a simple pitched sound from another sampler will do. Note that Multigrain's input doesn't have a preamp capable of directly bringing external sounds like microphones or line level equipment up to modular level. If you're using something from outside the rack, you'll need to process it through an input module like the ones on Audio I/O from Intellijel, or any other capable modular input of your choice.

Once you've connected your sound source to Multigrain's inputs, either normalling the left input to the right with only a monophonic connection, or using a true stereo pair from a stereo output, sampling can be very simple. First, engage the Thru button so you can monitor your sound through the stereo outputs, making sure to achieve a robust level without clipping. The Sample button is outlined in red on Multigrain's panel, and when you're ready for a quick sample, you can simply simultaneously press it while exciting the sound source of your choice to start recording, then press it again to stop once you've recorded a note with some sustain. Multigrain can hold up to 32 seconds of audio in a single sound, but the size knob limits us to a maximum of four second grains, so no need to run out of breath recording 32 seconds of a single saxophone note in this case. Once you've pressed the button a second time to stop recording, you'll see the sound buttons flicker blue in any empty sound slot, prompting you to press one and save it to your list of saved sounds.

Depending on your sound source, the choreography of playing a sound and pressing record simultaneously may be a tall order. As expected, Intellijel has provided us with a convenient tool for this with the Threshold feature, controlled by the knob marked Thresh in blue, and accessible in the Advanced Sampling Page. To access this page, which provides access to deeper sample editing features and other sample related settings, you'll first need to enter basic sampling, either by recording a sample in the way mentioned above, or by holding down the record button for one second, which will prompt Multigrain into its Basic Sampling Page using its Always Listening Buffer as a sound source. (We don't dive into the Always Listening Buffer in this article, but it's a handy feature which constantly records the last 32 seconds of audio, perfect for capturing happy accidents after the fact, live sampling, and more). To set a threshold, hold the record button again until the panel responds, and adjust the threshold control clockwise until your desired sound causes the LED below the knob to turn from blue to red, indicating that recording will be active at that threshold. You can now Exit the settings page without saving a sample to a slot, press the record button, and more leisurely attend to playing a note before ending recording and saving to a slot.

Back on the Home Page, you should now be able to hear your note performance in all its glory. Engage the Latch button, and then press the button you saved the sound to, allowing grains to automatically generate according to the default sound parameters described on Page 10 of the Multigrain manual (V1.1). Of course, your actual knob positions may not match this starting place, so it's as good a time as any to just wiggle those little guys willy-nilly, getting a feel for how this simple sound responds to different settings. Be sure to explore unlinking the Rate, Size, and Pitch controls as well in different combinations. If you'd like, you can also add modulation with the Random modulation control or using the three assignable CV inputs.

Default parameter values for any newly sampled sound in Multigrain

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Because we are working with a periodic sound that likely won't change much over the course of a short recording, especially if using electronic instruments which can have quite stable amplitude envelopes, you may find it isn't always easy to hear intuitively where in the sample your grains are generating from. If you feel inclined to explore further right away, Intellijel has included a ton of samples on board, which you can add to a sound slot by following the directions in the manual for doing so. Specifically useful for finding your footing are the included recordings of people counting from one to ten, which for me was quite helpful in affirmatively getting a sense of how the position and playback controls worked.

Once you feel comfortable with the sound parameters, find some parameter positions you like. For this example, I've started with a single note from a Rhodes Piano sample-based instrument, and used the controls to create smooth pad sounds without any pronounced transients. Important for this example, I've left the pitch control alone completely, as we will be exploring pitch quantization and it will be necessary to keep our sample around its natural pitch for our purposes. To add quantization, enter the Alt menu and press the Quant button. A likely-familiar set of twelve notes arranged in piano formation will greet you here, which you can then select to create your quantization of choice. This will change how modulation and manual adjustment of the Pitch control works, eschewing a smooth shift in place of quantized frequency relationships. Choose only the "C", "G", and perhaps "F" notes if you'd like to keep things open to most scales or explore classic drone textures with octaves, fifths, and fourths, or input your favorite scale or collection.

We can now make a secondary set of settings in the B Scene, making sure to find some clearly contrasting settings, for example reintroducing some of those plucky transients from the start of my Rhodes note, or changing up the quantization selections to move harmonically elsewhere. An easy place to start if you'd like to use the second scene to create such a variation is to hold Scene A and then press B, which will copy over all your settings, including the quantization options. This gives you a place to start from that's exactly where you were in Scene A, allowing you to make subtle adjustments from there to keep a sense of connection between Scenes, or traverse into something totally different.

Almost there! We now have two Scenes on a single sound slot, which we can manually morph between with the fader. Making sure pitch doesn't have any modulation applied, we can now copy our sound slot to another in a similar fashion as copying scenes, by simply pressing the first and then the second. Let's make four total copies, then press the first again to return to it as our active sound. Now, we are going to create some melodic movement by independently repitching each sound slot to a different note, creating a four note pattern we can play with the sound buttons. You may want to reduce quantization selections here if you're going for something specific, but it's also perfectly fine to simply find four different knob positions you like the sound of, as the quantizer will do the heavy lifting in keeping things in tune.

Multigrain in a Small System

Brian explains more about the patch below:

With Multigrain's focus on temporal customization and stellar audio quality, lush pastures of dreamy sound are easily attainable. When the reverb-drenched well runs dry, however, crisp, clean melodic passages can be conjured to make this a fantastic companion to any sequenced material. While it seems like it could function as an unconventional looper—and in some ways it can—it's best treated like a real-time audio buffer manipulator. This mindset and approach is how we're working with audio in this short video. After recording a small sequence into the Multigrain, we are modulating the start point of the grain while keeping the size fairly compact, giving us a nice melodic texture that highlights different segments of the sequence. Thanks to the Morph option, scenes A and B have slightly different parameters.

To keep the sequence more interesting, we are taking advantage of the tonal manipulation that is available. Largely due to the inclusion of a selectable pitch quantization option, the Multigrain can excel at consonant or dissonant passages that are at your control. Indicated by a light purple LED when engaged, you are able to select any note from a 12-TET keyboard, which function more like intervallic constraints rather than specific notes, though careful tuning can allow for that, as well. In the example video, we are modulating the Pitch parameter but constraining the notes to only octaves, perfect 5ths and perfect 4ths to create a mostly harmonious undulation based on the record material. Since the material contains some flattened intervals, we get an eerie, tense world that could easily be found in a low-budget adaptation of a pulp sci-fi novel.

Honing in on a specific set of features or a particular use-case can often yield the most fruitful result, and while there is so much that is possible with the Multigrain, it works beautifully when tastefully used. If that's not satisfying, however, the morphable scenes can satiate even the most maximalist of users, opening up the option to have two discrete flavors that can be worlds apart or variations on a theme.

Break Time

The world of microsound and its creative applications have historically, at least in my own experience, leaned into musical styles which allow for thoughtful consideration of timescale perception—ambient textures which morph over longform compositions, skronk-centric sonic utterances which stretch and contract freely, and the like. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these cultural formations have presented outside of the strict time of beat-based music. Multigrain itself, for example, is likely not going to be my go-to phrase looper in a beat-based context, as much of its capabilities draw me towards the loose and unmeasured world of amorphous time rather than bars and beats.

However, the same sorts of digital manipulations on a per-sample level have been quite important to plenty of dance musics which readily accept groupings of four quarter notes as their primary timescale. Akai-style timestretching and other early digital manipulations of audio have become signifiers for important musical cultures around sample-based music like drum and bass, jungle, and breakbeat. In fact, they may be the most widely popular implementations of microsound in musical culture, even if often unconsidered when gathering examples to stuff lovingly under the granular umbrella.

Since Multigrain gives us plentiful capabilities for synchronizing time to a stable clock, both via the Gate input and the Sync option, it stands to reason that we can totally chop some breaks on it. As it turns out, while there's some finicky considerations to make if you'd like your rhythmic material to not totally wash out into textural bliss, Multigrain offers a very unique tool for enhancing rhythmic material. Some of these ideas have already been explored in the fantastic musical examples from Red Means Recording, which I strongly suggest you check out if you're looking for more inspiration on Multigrain's versatile creative potential.

In this example, I've recorded a breakbeat from Ableton directly into Multigrain, using the Advanced Sampling Page to chop up different loops from the original pattern. Here is the first place where things can get a bit imprecise, as the coarse nature of the Start and End controls can make it tough to find exact transient points if you're wanting something specific—for that, I'd recommend instead preparing samples in a DAW, then importing to Multigrain via the SD card, which will save you a lot of time. However, if you're as impatient with your own creativity as I am, you may find that welcoming the imperfect loop can be creatively rewarding itself. I used the direction controls in the Advanced Sampling Page to allow me to audition each sample chop as a loop, moving the start and end controls until I found some loops that felt "good enough for jazz". Each time you save a new sound slot, the Advanced Sample Page will allow you to save another as long as you continue making adjustments to the sampling parameters, which makes quick work of crafting multiple sounds from a single recording.

Memein' and Dreamin' with Multigrain

With any effect, processing human speech samples can be a great way to create pronounced changes to an audio source, primarily because our ears are so well tuned to nuances of the human voice. Multigrain's immense capabilities can take speech samples into outer space very quickly, which is a fun way to show off what this potent processor can do for more specifically sound-design oriented goals outside of the purely-musical. Really any acoustic, noninstrumental sound with some clear character can be used in this way, taking something with close connection to our lives, and morphing it into alien utterances.

Building Progressions with Sound Slots

A simple voice in VCV Rack, tuned and quantized to fit against my chord progression on Multigrain.

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As a final example, here I've taken a recording of some lovely chords from a Roland Aira J-6, and split them into individual chords with the Advanced Sampling Page. Applying some timbral manipulations across each chord, then duplicating each to create a contrasting sound with pitch modulations in each sound's Scene B, we can create some very nuanced and complex pads for chordal accompaniment. Especially in a modular environment, where polyphony can be tough to come by, this allows for an easy source for harmonic movement. I've paired this with a repeating sequence from a simple voice in VCV Rack, taking both clock and trigger from a VCV sequencer to keep Multigrain's movements in sync, and improvised with subtle changes and morphing on the module to compose this small example.

Thanks to the Next input, keeping my chord progression constant is easy as pie, keeping a slow clock strolling along in order to create constant movement. While this example offers something you might use in a smaller portion of a performance, the same idea could be applied to longer form improvisations.

In Conclusion

Truthfully, I could dream up examples to share about Multigrain's creative capabilities for weeks on end, but for now I'll leave the dreaming for another time. As a refined construction that blends together a powerfully versatile granular sampling platform with an intuitive yet deep interface, Multigrain can readily provide a centerpiece for entire musical projects, or perhaps become the focus of your entire musical practice. Leaving you to your own granular experiments, I hope these examples and overview have helped develop a perspective on how Intellijel's powerful processor can be useful to your own creative practice, and wish you well on your own journey into the magical world of microsound with Multigrain.