Granular Synthesis - Graintable Synthesis

Graintable Synthesis

The Malström synthesizer in Propellerhead's Reason virtual music studio employs a technique known as Graintable synthesis, a technique ostensibly invented by Propellerhead for use in Malström:

Graintable synthesis is neither granular nor wavetable synthesis but a combination of the best of both methods. The results are exciting, controllable and texturally extremely varied. The basis of a Graintable is a sampled sound, which has been pre-processed using an extremely academic and complex method. A whole leaflet would be needed just to describe this. Suffice to say, the result is a perfect set of periodic waveforms that, due to the pre-processing, can be manipulated in a variety of ways. The Graintable can be treated as a wavetable: sweep through it, move through it at any speed without affecting pitch, play any little section repeatedly, use it to pick static waveforms, jump between positions etc. —Propellerhead,