Fill the Space of Your Instruments With Grain Delay

Grain Delay is a powerful and creative sound design tool. It is sometimes neglected due to its unique interface and gritty audio effect. Once you grasp its features, it can be an addicting audio effect that yields surprising effects. Combining pitch shifting with a classic delay effect is one of the significant functions of grain delay effects. By doing so, you may achieve very unique sounds. In the following tutorial, we'll show you how to fill the space of your instruments with grain delay in a simple piano sequence.

As usual, we have prepared a short sequence in our SoundBridge: DAW that includes most of the elements of the whole mix, including a simple piano sequence. Let's have a listen to it.

It sounds like a decent mix, but this piano chord sequence could use more movement. Let's listen to it solo.

To fill the space in the piano sequence, we'll add the Native Instruments Guitar Rig to the piano channel effect rack and select the grain delay effect.

We tweaked a few parameters of the Grain Delay effect, as shown in the image above. Twelve semitones have shifted the pitch, and the size has been set to around 120ms. Moving forward, we have increased the density to around 70% and Driven value to about 20%. Finally, we used the embedded low and hi-cut filters and the reverse switch to play the signal backward. Let's hear how our piano sequence sounds now.

Our piano sequence now has a lot more going on. For the end, let's listen to it with the other elements of the whole mix.

If you liked this article on frequency masking, here are some more on delay:

• Grain Delay
• Create Complex Sound Textures with Grain Delay
• 7 Expert Delay Effect Tips
• Make Complex Delay Effects With Replika XT (Part 1)
• Make Complex Delay Effects With Replika XT (Part 2)