LUCID Review
While testing Lucid, I made 50 presets which are available here: https://databroth.gumroad.com/l/vortex
I got to test Minimal Audio’s new granular effect Lucid. With some of the team having been involved with the design of Portal, I have had my hopes up for a Minimal Audio granular effect for awhile, and Lucid does not disappoint. Now I’ll just address this up front, Lucid is not better or worse than Portal, nor is it identical. Both granular effects offer unique features from one another and there’s no reason to play favorites. With that out of the way, I’d like to focus on Lucid and some of the cool features the Minimal Audio team have included to make this a fun new take on Granular.
Lucid is a fully fledged granular processor prefect for grain clouds, smeary time stretching, chaotic glitches and arpeggiated echoes. You have the typical grain controls, with a rate that goes as small as 1ms. All random spread controls are here as well as shape and skew for the grain window. A blur control disperses the grains fro a cloudier reverb-like quality. Lucid also has six assignable modulators, a macro orbit system, and a whole built in effects rack.
Things start to get interesting in the scale section, here you can set a key for grains to play back in when re-pitched. This section also offers an arp and chord mode, which will re-pitch grains to four different notes and play them in order. I really like this take of the effect. Most grain plugins allow you to set a key and randomly play grains within that key, but to have them actually play back in sequence adds unique musicality, though you can randomize them too if you’d like.
My favorite part of Lucid is the per-grain effects section. Here you have per-grain filters, imager, and delay. I’ve been asking for per-grain filters for awhile, and I am not disappointed with the sound. There’s a nice collection of filter curves to chose from, but I really prefer to use bandpass here. This allows you to give each grain a unique tonal quality. The grain filters change frequency per grain depending on the mod depth and can be randomized as well. This effect sounds great with fast and slow grains and really provides a wealth of new sonic options. The one feature missing now would be feedback.
The per grain imager is nice, it’s not just random panning, but offers some fun details to play around with. Then there’s the per grain delay, a very interesting choice. A full multi-tap delay for each and every grain, it has a pitch shifter as well. There is feedback here, but it doesn’t feed into the grain engine, it’s just feedback within the delay. Things can get pretty out of hand with this feature, I’m honestly surprised to see something like this included and don’t really understand how they pulled it off.
There’s a whole effects section just like you’ll find in Evoke. You get access to chorus, compressor, delay, distortion, EQ, filter, reverb and a shifter. You can load up to 12 effects with as many instances of each effect that you like. I won’t really go into each effect, but these really add quite a bit of variety to preset design. Having the extra delays gives you some more layers to work with and the EQs really let you sculpt your preset tones.
The modulation is the same that you will find in other Minimal Audio plugins. LFOs, Curves, and Followers. The LFO gives you access to random modulation while the Curves allow you to draw custom MSEGs. Having access to envelope followers in a grain plugin is nice for creating reactive effects. There’s also two macros with a simple orbit system. I really enjoy having some sort of macro animator in plugins, though it sort of turns your macros into modulators if you incorporate it into a preset.
I really enjoy this combination of unique features like per grain delays and filters along side the full effects section. Lucid starts to almost look like more of a multi effect rather than a granular plugin, though there’s enough focus on grains here to think of the effects as a very large bonus. My only concern with some of these new effects like Evoke and Lucid is that they don’t seem to be included as effects in Current. Which makes sense seeing how deep these are, is there going to be an effects rack nested inside a single Current effect? I think I’d prefer to see light version of these latest effects without the modulation/ effects rack, that could be included in Current, sort of like Rift and Polar.
These presets are available here: https://databroth.gumroad.com/l/vortex
You can pick up Lucid here: https://www.minimal.audio/products/lucid