The Quilcom Harvester: A polyphonic granular synthesiser

[Spogg]

Hello all!

The Quilcom Harvester is a polyphonic granular synthesiser capable of taking any sound clip as a wav file and creating modified or completely new sounds and allowing them to be played on your MIDI keyboard.

The user guide for this is a video on YouTube, since I thought it would be better to demonstrate the operation better that way.

Watch it at
https://youtu.be/t3MulEXN1Hs

The download zip contains the schematic, VSTi plugin, presets and a selection of WAV files so you can experiment straight away.

Download it here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/og63uyaixc19c ... 6.zip?dl=0

Updated to v1.01 on 7.7.17
Updated to v1.06 on 13.7.17

Have fun!

Cheers

Spogg

[BobF]

Hello gang,

This is truly a fantastic grain synth. Think of it as a kind of a sampler in that you can load any wave file you like, but now the fun starts. You can slice the wave file up into slices and make totally new sounds with them. I myself was going to make a grain synthisizer , but I just do not believe I could
create anything better. Spogg has done a superb job on this synth and it can create some really cool sounds. It's best to download Spogg's youtube video and watch it a few times to really get a feel for what it can do and then just play with it alot. Have fun!!!


Later then, BobF.....

[billv]

I agree Bobf. I watched the video. Great stuff Spogg.
Look forward to downloading it. It sounds great
And the user control systems look interesting and powerfull.
The gui however, could be more sexy!

[BobF]

I LIKE SEXY !!! Ha , ha.....

[tulamide]

Damn.

Although you oriented very much at PadShop Pro, the results are not comparable, which is due to the clicks. That limits the applications for this synth. It is still impressive, but not so much usable in everyday sound design (it's more suited for extreme fx).

Those who don't know what I'm talking about, here's an example:
https://youtu.be/g1Hy2kymk5I

[Spogg]

Although you oriented very much at PadShop Pro, the results are not comparable, which is due to the clicks.

Thanks for the feedback!
I'm concerned that you're getting clicks though. It would help me if you could describe where you're getting clicks when you're running the actual VSTi plugin.In the video I did there are one or two artefacts I think because I was running a screen capture app and 2 sound cards at the same time. Anything you can tell me, that I can reproduce, will help me improve the results.

Cheers

Spogg

[rdgaudio]

Very nice Synth Spogg Sir.

[Spogg]

I've updated this to version 1.02 which is now linked in the first post.

Changes:

- Fixed LFO ASM code error (duplicate line) as found by Martin Vicanek.

- Removed a de-zipper to actually improve the behaviour of the grain Length control.


Cheers

Spogg

[Walter Sommerfeld]

Very fine Synth... indeed Mr Spogg

Keep on doing!

Cheers

Walter

[Spogg]

This is now at version 1.06 linked in the first post

Version 1.06 addresses several changes to improve the performance, quality and versatility of sounds with very short grain lengths, typically less than approximately 1000 samples (0.05% on the demo wav).

- Reduced gate time to a 1 sample trigger to prevent automatic looping on short lengths.
- Reworked the precision counter system for self-controlled looping.
- Reworked the Scythes (grain generators) to sync from the precision counter when used and set in looping mode.
- Replaced defective stream selectors which had got corrupted during initial development (took about 10 hours to find!).
- Added a x10 LED switch to the create rate system to take advantage of the updates.
- Created 6 new “tula” patches to demo short grain lengths (tularice is my favourite!).

There are no changes to the previous presets and any you made should work fine, except if they used very short grain lengths. In this case they will need to be revisited.

The only operation change is the addition of the create rate x10 LED switch which extends the create rate and is really only intended for very short grains. If set to a high rate on longer grains there will be interaction which can produce some possibly interesting sounds.

I want to extend my extreme gratitude to tulamide who helped by creating a preset to expose shortcomings. I had not looked at the performance on very short lengths, being biased towards the preset sounds that interested me personally. This was a big favour to me and this kind of feedback is always most welcome.

Cheers

Spogg