GranSample

I spend most days with grains, so GranSample is a pad sampler with a granular engine underneath: bring in a recording, shape it into something playable, sequence it. The defaults took the longest.

With two or more grains covering every moment, the windows sum to a nearly flat line and every setting melts into the same wash. Now it's 50 ms grains at 20 a second, where each grain roughly ends as the next one starts. That's the edge between chopped and smeared, and small knob moves actually change the sound there.

The pads can't feel how hard you hit. The glass mostly knows where you touched and roughly how big the touch was, so a fingertip plays soft and a flat thumb plays loud. The lightest tap still comes out at 30% so nothing vanishes.

Some of it is just fighting the phone. Two granular pads on the same sequencer step once silenced the iPhone speaker until a restart. A finger is always a few ms late, so now each voice's first grain starts a random 0 to 5 ms late. Each pad caps at 48 grains at once, because past about 50 it's a wall of grains anyway.