This makes it possible to play with the tonal characteristics and temporal dynamics of each. It all begins with turning your audio file into six independent layers.

This creative sampler combines several powerful features that let you create instruments that will turn heads. Known primarily for their Waveform DAW, Tracktion does occasionally come up with brilliant synth, sampler, and effects plugin ideas as well (more than most people might assume).

You will find many competitive plugins throughout this guide, but we settled on Portal as our best overall pick. There were plenty of plugins competing for our best overall selection, so just know that we pored over this one. It’s great for adding atmosphere, rhythmic movement, and various textures to your tracks. It’s an Output plugin, so of course it comes loaded with powerful features too – grain controls, modulation, FX, time stretch, humanize, and even pitch shift.Īltogether, you should expect to find over 250 presets, a circular visualizer (linked to granular parameters), time manipulation engine, tempo synced grain delay, scale-based pitch modulation, seven FX with a master compressor and filter, value readout panel, presets and “favoriting” feature, as well as built-in tool tips.Īll in all, Portal is delightful.

This, they say, should produce a more musical result overall. Instead of churning out an abstract, mangled mess, however, it will provide an output that closely resembles the original audio. Output’s Portal is a granular FX plugin that resythesizes your sounds.

Arturia granular