Lapse

Lapse is a granular time-stretch instrument for the Critter & Guitari Organelle M.

Pitch and speed are independent. That's the whole idea. You can slow something to a crawl without it dropping an octave, or shift it up two octaves while it keeps crawling. Feed it a guitar, a synth, a field recording — anything — and stretch it out of shape.

The knobs

K1 — Pitch. How fast you read inside each grain. ±1 octave.
K2 — Stretch. How fast the playhead moves through the buffer. 1× to 8×.
K3 — Quality. Turn it down and it gets old. Sample-rate reduction and bit crushing, from clean to genuinely broken.
K4 — Slices. Grain length, 30 ms to 400 ms. Short is choppy and stuttering; long is smooth and blurred.

AUX — Sub + verb. Press it and the playhead winds down like a record losing power, over about five seconds, while an octave-below ghost blooms up underneath with its own reverb. Release and it spins back up.

How to use it

Set the knobs, then go play something through it. Lapse is a processor with state rather than a keyboard — you configure a system and then perform into it. Locking in a sound and playing against it is the intended way round.

Debugging tip that's also a playing tip: feed it something short and distinctive — a single click, one plucked note with silence after. With continuous material everything smears together and you can't hear what any one knob is doing.

Installation: unzip into your Organelle's Patches folder.

Free. Made with Pure Data.