LITOTE: FREE Granular Effect Review
Recently Inear Display released their whole plugin line-up for free. Litote, being one of these newly free plugins will be my first review of the collection. Litote is a four part granular effects processor. Now I’ve reviewed many granular effects at this point, and plan to compare and contrast them all very soon, but Litote actually does something I’ve wanted to make myself. Litote is four simple granular engines arranged on an XY pad, each corner is its own grain send allowing you to mix and morph between various granular textures.
Each grain engine is pretty simple, you get controls for grain size, jitter, rate, diffusion, and resonance. Unfortunately there’s no measurement readout for the grain size, so I can’t easily compare the control range to other grain effects, but it does get into the audio range. The resonance feedback is a nice touch adding some tonal variation to the grain sound and the diffusion really softens things up.
I think Litote becomes a lot more interesting when you start applying motion to the XY pad. This lets you smoothly blend between the various granular sends to transform between various textures. I find granular effects tend to produce a single texture, so it’s nice to slowly morph between various grain textures. This is also where Litote somewhat falls short, you get range and rate controls for the X and Y axis motion, but I’d have really loved for there to be some sort of simple path drawing available here to create custom motion between textures. I also think it would have been cool to have a mode that actually interpolates the controls between each corner rather than crossfading the engines (which is also really cool)
Litote gives you randomization buttons for everything, you can randomize and copy/paste each corner as well as the trajectory settings. I personally don’t enjoy these preset randomizer buttons, but I know many people do. While this grain engine is simple, it still manages to do a couple unique things and is probably one of the cooler free granular effects out there, definitely check this one out and check back for more Inear Display reviews soon.
You can pick up Litote for free along side Inear Display’s other plugins here: https://ineardisplay.gumroad.com/