Thoughts on the Tasty Chips GR-1

Before I begin: This is not sponsored content and I am definitely not being paid for this post (lol — someday, maybe). It is only my opinion and I just had to get it out of my system.

Over the past six months I’ve been elbows-deep in what is easily the most engrossing synthesizer I have ever touched, the Tasty Chips GR-1 granular synthesizer. In start contrast to my other granular hardware (Mutable Instruments’ Clouds, and Make Noise Music’s Morphagene) the GR-1 boasts a 7” screen that displays the sample, the active grains, and their shape. While this might sound like a gimmick (or merely a convenience), having that immediate visual feedback makes all the difference in crafting textures, soundscapes, and pads—and doing so on the fly. A series of pots, faders, and built-in LFOs affect a variety of parameters—position, grain size, density, shape, ADSR parameters, filter cutoff, resonance, and so on. You know… all the things.

Oh, here I am demonstrating the GR-1’s immediacy and live-sampling capabilities.

The immediacy and the visual feedback has been making fall in love all over again with the more exploratory phase of music creation, which has lately been a means to an end (i.e., crafting a track). Now a completed track is merely an optional byproduct of this process of experimentation, scanning over samples and tweaking knobs and slides. Put another way: I’m having a lot of fun just playing with the device. It is the same feeling I experience when first diving deep into the Morphagene.

I guess that comment warrants some notes on the comparison between the two. The Morphagene has some advantages in the realms splicing a sample, sequencing those splices, CV control, and sound-on-sound recording. As undisputed champion in those areas, it definitely has a niche and will probably stay in my rack until the end of time. As a synth module, I suppose it only makes sense that it fits into a niche. Despite it’s granular capabilities, it excels in the space that would have formerly been occupied by absurdly elaborate tape splicing setups.

Now, the GR-1 on the other hand, excels in just about every other area—as you would expect from a machine that costs twice as much. But there are challenges if I wanted to recreate the Morphagene tape-splicing functionality. For starters, there’s not really the concept of splices… you can set the boundaries of a sample and lock the cursor’s position therein, but I cannot set a dozen markers and jump from one to another on the fly. Something similar can be accomplished with sending a sequence by CV, but this seems less precise in practice.

Furthermore, I haven’t figured out a good way to accomplish a sound-on-sound, time-lag-accumulation effect with the GR-1. Since this device supports live looping recording and playback, I imagine it must be possible by feeding the output (and whatever input) to a mixer and then feeding it back into the machine, but my experiments in this realm have not yielded adequate results (but it is something I intend to experiment with again). Again, these are different devices that fill different niches.

Despite all the praise I have for the GR-1, there are certainly a few issues. At the top of that list might be the somewhat awkward and possibly buggy process of managing samples, patches, and performances. I think more than once I’ve had a patch (or worse, a sample) wiped out of existence either by some terrible bug or some mistake I made in traversing the menus. Tasty Chips GR-1 news and announcements seem to suggest some change is coming, and indeed it seems like some recent firmware has reduced my frustrations.

Another complaint is the somewhat unimpressive MPE implementation. Albeit, it works, but in a sort of no-frills, bare minimum sense. With all the sophisticated touch sensitivity on my Linnstrument, it is really only good for triggering ASDR envelopes. I would expect at least to be able to craft an expressive “envelope” with the pressure of my finger. Even though I can map aftertouch to amplitude, it doesn’t seem to have much affect. This ought to work, and ideally I would have a filter cutoff for each note of polyphony, also responsive to pressure. The timbre parameter (the Linnstrument’s y-axis) seems to work well enough, however, and gives me much joy.

Although the hardware driving the GR-1 seems generally capable, and there visual indicators that appear when you are pushing the machine to its limitations, I still experience quite noticeable dropouts in the sound that happen abruptly even when I’m not taxing the machine especially hard. They last maybe less than a millisec ond, but it necessitates editing out the popping and crackling, which has been a bit of a pain.

Even given these drawbacks, I’m still in love with this machine. I look forward to many more hours tuning motorboat samples with the sound of 3D printers or geese honking and turning traffic noise into ambient tracks. I’ve already recorded a few things that I’ll be sure to post about soon-ish.