"I'm a big fan of the way you can spice up even quite plain tones into something epic. It instantly satisfies your creative streak and at a fraction of a Eurorack module."

Steve Levine. Producer / Engineer (Culture Club, The Beach Boys)

"...it's absolutely magic! Transform anything into a long lush soundscape, stuttering, a bouncing rhythmic groove, or a trip through space and time."

Tim Bazell. Mix Engineer

"It's such a great plugin for creating exciting and unique parts to a production with the audio you already have."

Romesh Dodangoda. Producer / Mixer (Motörhead, Bring Me The Horizon)

Creative Sound Re-Shaper

Efx FRAGMENTS is a software effect that allows you to divide, transform, and rebuild any sound by unlocking the power of granular processing. Instantly elevate any project with glitchy stutters, grainy stereo ambience, experimental textures, and beyond.

Effortlessly Transform, Instantly Inspire

Breathe life, musicality, and character into any sound, and discover inspiring & intricate new textures.

From dramatic rhythmic stutter effects to cloudy reverb shimmers, and everything in between. Efx FRAGMENTS takes the complex concept of granular synthesis and makes it more flexible, more accessible, and more musical than ever.

Glitch & Stutter

Build tension and sprinkle variety into your beats, compositions, and soundscapes with dramatic stop-start stutters, pitch-shifted fluctuations, and reality-shattering glitches. Slice sounds rhythmically or, go totally off-grid for true sonic chaos.

Rhythmic Variations

Efx FRAGMENTS listens to the rhythm of your track and can respond in a number of creative ways. Make every grain of sound respond to your tempo for glitchy beats, fractured rhythmic textures, flowing percussive sequences, and more.

Textural Enhancement

Whether you want to add sparkling character, or just make something ‘feel’ better in a mix, immediately excite and accentuate any instrument stem, loop, or vocal part with the ethereal sound of granular processing, complete with built-in mix-ready FX.

Beauty or Chaos

Whether you want musical or experimental, beautiful or chaotic, Efx FRAGMENTS can make any sound exciting, evocative, and entirely yours. Effortlessly explore and manipulate granular processing with amazing sonic results guaranteed.

Redefining Ambient

Go beyond conventional reverb and delay and immerse your mixes in material ambience. Create vast shimmering clouds of sound particles, delicate cave-echo trickles, or fast-flowing spatial movement with any sound source.

Forge New Timbres

Turn the smallest transient, the crunchiest sample, or the most unassuming stem into a bowed string, a grainy drum hit, or a mix-enveloping pad. By tightly weaving grains together, Efx FRAGMENTS creates texture and density in the most unexpected ways.

Granular Synthesis Explained

At its most basic level, granular synthesis involves splitting a sound into parts - ‘grains’ - and using them in creative ways.

You can change the size of the grains, the amount of space between them, their pitch, their playback behaviour - the list goes on.

The resulting sound is both highly recognizable and wholly unique to granular. Frozen timbres from smooth & transparent to sharp & brittle; rainfall delay that drenches any mix; dense clouds of reverberating sonic texture; cascading modulations that turn a short sound into an endless flow.

Once you’ve experienced Efx FRAGMENTS’ unique interpretation of granular processing, you’ll never look back.

Part of a Whole

Efx FRAGMENTS breaks the process of granular synthesis down into easy-to-use modules that intuitively interact with each other.

By individually tweaking different parts of the granular process, you can explore and experiment with your sound with absolute control and unprecedented detail; here’s how it works.

1) Buffer

This is where incoming audio passes through to be used as the raw material for Efx FRAGMENTS’ grains, giving you real-time, top-level control over its behaviour. See the moving playback and recording points, customize the buffer length, tweak the feedback and wet/dry levels, and freeze the buffer in place for a static slice of sound.

2) Grain Capture

Here you can explore the many tools that Efx FRAGMENTS uses to capture grains from the buffer, from the Speed controls to the Transient & Snap-To-Grid quantization modes. Make your grain capture respond to hits and swells, introduce ‘sprays’ at random, manually scan what you’ve captured, and more; granular essentials.

3) Grain Release

At the core of Efx FRAGMENTS’ interface is an array of parameters and responsive options that give you full control over every aspect of the newly-created grains’ behaviour, from shape to play direction to density - and far beyond. The Grain Release module is topped off with a dynamic visualizer, providing vivid visual feedback of your sound.

Pan & FX

Navigate the stereo space of your mix in a plethora of curious and exciting ways, from randomized grain panning to tempo-synced movement around a virtual 3D space. For the final end-of-chain touch, run Efx FRAGMENTS’ signal through two FX slots, featuring algorithms like Multi-Filter, Tape Echo, Stereo Flanger, and more.

5) Advanced Controls

In keeping with the rest of Arturia's virtual instruments and FX plugins, Efx FRAGMENTS comes armed with a host of dynamic modulation and expression tools. Assign Macros to multiple parameters for real-time sweeping effects, make your grains respond to each beat with a built-in Envelope Follower, create custom functions and step sequences.

Granular Triple Threat

Despite its near-boundless possibilities and potential for sonic chaos, granular synthesis doesn't need to be daunting.

Efx FRAGMENTS distils this expansive concept into 3 clearly defined modes that deliver tangible, usable, and inspiring results - whatever your style.

Classic - As the name suggests, this is Efx FRAGMENTS' broadest and most customizable mode. Choose between quantization and chaos, lengthy grains or pinpoint snippets of sound, delicate enhancement or outright granular destruction.
Rhythmic - Rhythmic mode locks grain size and density in with tempo-matched values, ensuring that every grain pulses, flutters, and resonates in perfect sync with your project. Great for creating precise machine-like movement and mangled drum loops.
Texture - Create sprawling clouds of sound, ethereal mix-filling drones, and organic bow-like resonance. Texture mode introduces features like the Layers macro, creating a harmonious relationship between size and density that adds ensemble-like richness to Efx FRAGMENTS' sound.

Sound Design Frontier

Granular synthesis goes beyond glitchy transients and shimmering reverb.

Efx FRAGMENTS is designed as an end-to-end granular toolkit, offering never-before-seen sound design flexibility, features, and presets to make any sound interesting.

Animating Sound - Turn the simplest sample or drum loop into an exciting focal feature in your mix. Any sound, no matter how static or plain will become an animated, living, breathing sonic curiosity when processed through Efx FRAGMENTS. Keep things moving without relying on ambience or repetitive sequences with features like Spray, randomization, macros, and the Advanced modulation section.
Exploring Pitch - Go beyond basic harmonization and shimmering octave shifts with accurate pitch tracking, scale quantization, and spatial enhancement. Make harmonic and melodic content more interesting, more textural, and more characterful by experimenting with Efx FRAGMENTS' +/-3 octaves of pitch-shifting capabilities, randomized fine-tuning for swirling chorus and detuning effects, and more.
Freeze - Bend the rules of time and sound by freezing any audio in place. Experimenting with different combinations of size and grain while engaging Efx FRAGMENTS' Freeze function can create never-ending drones from a single frozen point of your sound. Transform a short sound into an artificial dense trail, create a pedal note layer underneath a melody, or manually skim through a sound by adjusting the play-head position.
Rhythmic Variation - Take a simple beat or repeating drum loop and inject variation, colour, and complex rhythmic content in seconds. Using Efx FRAGMENTS' tempo-sync options alongside built-in Step Sequencer, Pitch control, and Grain Crush can twist and contort your drums and percussion beyond recognition while retaining their core rhythmic purpose. An essential tool for enhancing beats, drum hits, and rhythm sections.
Distort, Destroy - Yes, Efx FRAGMENTS can introduce subtle changes and character to a sound - but it has an extreme side too. Add grit and noisy digital artifacts with the Grain Crush feature, including authentic bit-crushing algorithms from CMI V and Emulator II V; Go red-hot with Multi-Distortion in the FX slots; Crank settings to the extreme using essential effects like Comb Filter, Phaser, and Tape Echo; push your granular sound to the limit.
Double Axis Spatializer - From rich stereo modulation to detailed reverb & delay FX, to the versatile Pan module, Efx FRAGMENTS gives you full control of the stereo field. Introduce random left-to-right movement, hypnotic stereo drones, spacious granular atmosphere, and everything in between.

Features

Creative effect plugin based on granular processing
Features 3 distinct granular modes: Classic, Texture & Rhythmic
Pitch quantization with 15 different scales
Grain quantization with transient detection or snap-to-grid modes
Spatializer section with 9 different trajectories presets
2 FX slots with sophisticated routing for unique sound design possibilities
Advanced modulation section, featuring an envelope follower, 3 function generators and a step sequencer
Curated 60-preset library for instant access to inspiring tones
Apple M1 compatibility

System Requirements

Works in VST, AAX, Audio Unit

Mac

Mac OS 10.13+
4 GB RAM
2.5GHz CPU or Apple Silicon
2GB free hard disk space
OpenGL 2.0 compatible GPU

Windows

Win 8.1+ (64bit)
4 GB RAM
2.5 GHz CPU
2GB free hard disk space
OpenGL 2.0 compatible GPU
ARM processors not supported on Windows

Protection

All Arturia software is protected by the Arturia Software Center.