A good technique for timestretch feedback but it’s still limited in terms of controlling the tone. Good for when using beats but when used with other instruments sounds they all start sounding the same.[/quote]
Not sure what you are referring to. There is no feedback here, we are playing a tiny controlled snippet of a wave. The result can then be used to generate sounds in the spirit of a graintable. To each his own.[/quote]
Tiny slices can generate sounds kind of like granular synthesis but I think the confusion is slicing isn’t granular. Even though the sound does get broken up there is a difference. One way to look at it would be timestretch slicing is like a loaf of sliced bread and granular synthesis is a bowl of rice. With creating stutters and glitch beats timestretch slicing is really good but when wanting to manipulate other material like gongs and tonal instruments then the character of the sound quickly becomes lost. There are techniques to smooth out low rate stretching in the Octatrack etc but it’s never as effective or as convenient as having a dedicated set of controls in dealing with tonal material. If the Octatrack is able to have dedicated controls for granular synthesis is yet to be seen but it would be a great addition.
Never mentioned slicing. Not what I’m talking about. Doesn’t matter, carry on bro! 
I see the Octatrack as a sample mangling device so YES ! granular synthesis would be a great addition really and would set it apart.
I could be wrong but I believe granular synthesis requires a lot of number crunching and it’s possible that the CPU(s) used in the OT don’t have enough juice to calculate the information to get a good result. I’m certain Elektron engineers and programmers are familiar with the technology involved but maybe it would have required more processing power which of course equals more money, and we already see the complaints about pricing for electronic devices these days so…
The Virus TI line has a limited granular engine, and the Snow variant only has one Motorola DSP. The Octatrack has two dual core Motorola DSPs (I forget the part numbers, though) iirc. The TI2 might be dual core, or just faster variants of what is in the TI, I can’t say.
That said, the grain/cloud engine eats a lot of DSP and can cut heavily into the available amount of polyphony/dsp power from what I’ve read.
It’s quite possible the DSPs in the OT might not be able to keep up with everything else it has going on.
It would be nice for Elektron to tell us if that’s the case, though, and lay this to rest once and for all 
I’d like to have this as well, but if it would eat up that much processing, is it worth it? Would the inclusion of a granular machine possibly prohibit their ability to add other machines or features in the future?
Spent a couple hours with this last night and I’d like to update my opinion. You can do granular right now, but it is a fair amount of dicking around and consumes several tracks.
So I agree, there could be a very interesting granular machine - however, my concern is that it would be kind of a one-trick pony. It may be herecy but I feel this same way about the digipro machines on the Monomachine. Interesting sounds, but for the most part very same-y to my ears.
i agree…at least if the subtraction section (Filters) is not something like the Sherman Filterbank…ihihhih
Granular synthesis is a great way to strongly manipulate material and have various control of the tone and texture of the sound. It’s different to wavescanning or short loop lengths and modulating the start point as that tends destroy any original tone or texture the original instrument sound had and does sound same-y. With granular synthesis there is commonly controls for grain density and jitter either pitch jitter or position jitter which kind of smooths out the sound because it is broken into a series of grains. Handy for creating clouds and soundscapes or even shorter tonal instruments sounds. With the Octatrack I think it would be a great addition to have a machine or even an effect that provides this form of synthesis to give greater variety in manipulating a wider palette or sounds. I think due to processor power in the Octatrack a grain effect or grain delay would be more feasible.
The Virus TI synths are very powerful machines and run at 24/96 I think from memory which is more than the Octatrack 24/48. The Octatrack might be able to pull it off if a Granular machine couldn’t operate with incoming audio (no inputs) and had to pre process the audio material or maybe even a grain effect instead of a machine. The Dark Reverb in the Octatrack is very dense and I think it would use quite a bit of processor power so maybe something granular could be possible as an effect.
If they couldn’t do a Granular Machine, I’d be happy with being able to use granular as an effect on one of the blocks, and even limited to say, the first one like the reverbs are limited to the second one.
I have done some stuff along granlur lines…
One thing i have done is to create one (or more often two) flex machines playing EXTREMLY short grains then i route them to “CUE” and set up a pickup machine recording from CUE… That pickup machine sort of create a grain cloud evertime (set gain to taste to and adjust it to adjust the denisty of the cloud) a key to this is also to have the flex machines on a diffrent amount of steps than the loop on the flex, i had in flex so that i sound is trigged at one and four on a five step pattern length the set the loop to 4, 6 or eight steps recoding.
To make even more crazy i have had the flex machine(s) listen to a loop (the recodred of a pickup machine) recoding live gutiar so that what gets played on the flex machines is dependenf in what I have in the live loop so that the cloud can evolve…
This setup can do anything from some sort of crazy effect to full out grain madness… a further step could be to have a flex machine playing from the recorder of the “Grain Picjup” that way i could play parts of the cloud on the sequencer, perhaps creating melodies on what is the current content of the loop.
YES i use several track BUT in this way my octatrack is more used like a modular synth than a samper…
THis track is using some og the stuff desribed to create the perculating sound behind the improvised guitar…
Here is another simular example:
And what sound like sick congas drumming in the second half of this track is made the same way
All the tracks is live guitar and octatrack recorded in “real time” with none or very little effects, compression and reverb. som MINIMAL edits…
This is great Anders, a perfect example of how a machine is limited by the user not it’s features.
And a reminder for me to start using the pickup machines…
Agree. I´m feeling the same way, Anders stuff so far is a great reminder of how much there is to explore within the OT utilising several tracks…
They sound great Abergdahl! They definitely have a grain type effect. I think Veqtor’s petition is to have a machine or effect in the Octatrack to achieve something like this but without having to utilize a few tracks or access this type of sound more swiftly or with more flexibility. Granular synthesis creates grains not only by small loop lengths which is only a small part of the processing but from also playing many of them back at varying lengths and at varying times at varying frequencies. I think this is where the Octatrck may have trouble as I believe at the moment it can only play one “grain” at a time. You have gotten around that limitation some what by sending it to a pickup machine but at the expense of flexibility. What you made sounds great though. It would be nice to see a grain machine in the Octatrack that could play back grains at the same time as a loop length can be made up from multiple grains and not just one and I suspect processing power may be stretched very thin. An effect would probably be more likely or realistic. Great stuff Abergdahl!
I respectfully disagree, I think using more tracks adds to the flexibility, also I like the modular way of looking at the octrack (and MD) what Anders mentions.
Using more tracks means more LFOs and more FX slots and thus opening the graincloud up to more variables. For example delays and retrigger combinations could be used to control density of the clouds.
The more machines we add to the OT the complexer it becomes to new users and we’ll only generate more feature requests, complaints and RTFM situations. My 2cents.
I can only agree that the more tracks means more lfo’s etc but I was implying flexibility in terms of sequencing a cohesive sequence instead of abstract experimenting(which is also valuable). Of course there is the creativity of routing signals all over the place as that can have very creative results. At the moment the octatrack doesn’t have any granular abilities which is what the petition is requesting, Sure you can get grain or graincloud type effects but not granular processing. And I also agree that adding more machines may ad to the complexity for new users especially when beginners have problems with dubbing and looping already on the octatrack but is it any more complex than routing to different tracks to imitate an effect already?
+1 any additional machines or effects would surely open up some exciting new techniques.
I’m all for this! Sign me up! 
I need to hear this put in a different way. I do not even begin to understand what you are doing but it sounds brilliant.