I want to tell you about one of my favorite musical tools called the Granulator. It lets you create weird new instruments out of any sound at all, even a half second strike of you hitting a metal railing with your keys could be turned into an eerie pad for your next horror movie soundtrack.
The Granulator is a free Max For Live instrument, thought that does mean you must own Ableton Live and Max For Live to use it. But it allows you to take any audio sample and stretch it across your entire MIDI keyboard letting you play it at any pitch in a way that sounds pretty natural - or at least interesting.
This is not using normal sampling technology though. Granular synthesis allows you to playback tiny snapshots of audio at different speeds without changing their pitch, layering them and crossfading them together to create continuous sound.
The Granulator gives you a lot of control over the amplitude envelope too so that you can take long sounds like a howling tea kettle and turn them into short, sharp piano attacks. Or you can take short percussive scrap metal sounds and turn them into slowly evolving atmospheric pads.
It also lets you add different degrees of randomization into your sound. Say we're working with a sharp sound like a sledgehammer on a piece of sheet metal. You can have the Granulator only stretch out the transients at the beginning of your sound during the initial strike, and then add a tiny bit of randomization in so that the each note starts at a slightly different place. Even if it is only a few milliseconds of difference, this creates the kind of organic variation you would hear in an acoustic instrument.
You can also have your sounds play back forwards, backwards or both. And it allows you to add in FM effects, and lots of other good stuff. All without eating all of your CPU. I have Ableton Live sets with 8-12 of these playing at once with no hiccups at all. Enjoy!
This instrument was created by Robert Henke of the music project Monolake.