EMERGENCE1 Review
Daniel Gregely sent me a copy of his Emergence1 granular processor. Emergence1 is a pro version of his free Emergence grain effect. Emergence1 offers four grain streams, four LFOs, and four random modulators. The UI isn’t my personal preference, opting for a “knob-per-function” layout. I tend to find this a bit visually overwhelming and prefer compartmentalized layouts. In my personal opinion, just a couple tabs can go a long ways, I’m not suggesting “menu-diving” by any means, but organizing redundant controls can actually help speed up production.
That said, for people who absolutely hate tabs at all costs and really just want to see everything all at once, this will feel right at home. That said, you can collapse sections independently if you want to reduce on screen controls, but I find this to be even more tedious than using tabbed sections. With the UI out of the way, I really like the sounds that Emergence1 has to offer.
Emergence1 has four independent grain streams allowing you to stack multiple granular effects all at once. Each grain stream is capable of setting it’s own, position, rate, grain size, pitch, envelope, and mix. The rate control goes all the way up to 10Khz, allowing for some incredibly fast audio rate grain playback, possibly even one of the fastest grain rates. The increment control moves the grain position either forward or backwards and grain rate can go down as small as 1ms. Speaking of position, I noticed there is no “scatter” control, or any per-grain randomization that you’d find in other grain effects, which does unfortunately limit the possibilities within a single grain stream.
There’s a nice mini keyboard to set the scale for the pitch control, which comes in handy with modulation. Each grain gets an ADSR envelope, sort of an odd choice if you ask me, I personally prefer classic window shapes with a skew control, but if you’ve ever wanted ADSR per grain, you’re in luck. I’m really happy to see feedback and buffer size controls. Feedback obviously opens up a ton of cool resonant effects, especially paired with the incredibly fast grain rates. The buffer size control is really cool though, you can go all the way down to 10ms, which also works great with the feedback, but more importantly you can actually modulate the buffer size!
Emergence1 also offers a significant amount of modulation, four LFOs and four random modulators, as well as four macros, and two envelope followers. Each LFO can be set to basic oscillator shapes as well as noise, which technically gives you four more randomizers. I mentioned earlier that there was no scatter or per-grain random controls, and while the random modulators don’t quite make up for this, they do offer a nice amount of rhythmic chaotic motion. It’s also worth noting that the modulation can go incredibly slow, all the way down to 0 HZ with 0.0001 Hz precision. I find myself craving this really slow modulation for long evolving textures and often times I wish other plugins would allow for modulation slower than 1 or 5 hz. The envelope followers are an interesting addition, I don’t work with envelope followers too often, but they can really come in handy for managing feedback.
While I have a few complaints about Emergence1, I really apreciate some of the ranges and options that are available here: incredibly fast grain rates, variable buffer size that can be modulated, four grain streams, and eight sources of motion that can go incredibly slow. There’s actually a lot of really solid advantages to Emergence1 that make it a solid granular contender. Emergence1 is an effect I will use when I want long transforming textural motion or really chaotic glitchy feedback. I think there’s a wide range of sounds as it is, but I do think that could be expanded with some sort of scatter controls.
You can pick up Emergence1 from Daniel Gregely’s website here: https://danielgergely.net/emergence
Scroll to the bottom for the free version