Introducing Three New Granular Modes in Wave Collider

Wave Collider 1.1 is out. The update adds a new Granular section to the blend mode menu, growing the palette from 22 to 25 modes with three newcomers: Rain, Hail, and Cloud.

Granular processing is one of the best-loved tools in sound design. The idea: chop audio into tiny slices, called grains, then replay them with new timing, order, and pitch. Because every grain still carries the fingerprint of the source, the result can transform a sound completely while staying recognizably connected to it. A vocal becomes a shimmering pad, a drum loop a stuttering texture, a synth line an ambient wash. Wave Collider's take is granular blending: the grains are drawn live from two signals at once, replayed from a short rolling recording of the incoming audio, with zero added latency.

Rain, Hail, and Cloud

Rain scatters short grains of the two inputs, each with a sharp attack and a ringing decay tail. At low rates it is a sparse patter of individual grains over silence; turn it up and they overlap into a dense granular shower. A Filter dial can tune every grain to its own random pitch, transforming the shower into a chime-like texture.

Hail switches rhythmically between the two sources in a repeating pulse pattern, from smooth, even alternations to syncopated figures to a fresh coin flip on every step. Its Freeze dial recalls earlier chunks from the recent past for stutter and glitch effects, up to a full scramble of recent history.

Cloud weaves a continuous cloud of small grains drawn from both sources, each grain at its own random pitch, for shimmering, smeared textures. Sweeping its Bias dial morphs one sound into the other through a granular mosaic, which makes Cloud an unusually musical crossfader.

Like every Wave Collider mode, the new three bring their own set of carefully tuned dials, join the Randomize buttons for instant happy accidents, and are fully automatable from the DAW or host. All three run with zero latency. The dial-by-dial reference lives in the manual.

A free update

Wave Collider 1.1 is a free update for existing users. It runs as VST3 and AU on macOS and VST3 on Windows, with a free demo available on the Wave Collider page. The iPad version (AUv3) is on the App Store.