The Murmur walkthrough video, transcribed

[1:42]Free and paid

Hey, and welcome to Murmur. Today I'm going to show you a few cool ways you can make sounds with this new granular instrument. Murmur comes in a free and paid tier. The free tier is free forever. It's not a trial, nothing counts down, and it never goes quiet on you. It just has fewer features. I'll be running through everything today, so anything you see dimmed out in your free version is part of the paid version. But feel free to download the free version now and have a play around for yourself. There is no email required to download it.

[2:10]Loading a sample

Firstly, when you load up Murmur, you will have a blank slate. You can come up to the preset name at the top and open some templates that I've made that give you some customizations out of the box. Or you can start on the initialised preset and just simply drag an audio file onto the main display. You can do this from a track, for example like this in Ableton, from the side panel, or from your computer's file explorer. Once you've dragged the sounds that you want, you can immediately start playing the sound as a MIDI instrument.

[2:43]Position, size, density

The first thing you might want to do is change the position of where you're playing in your sound. You can do this by clicking on the waveform to where you want to go, or by using the position knob. From there, you can adjust the size, which is how long each grain is. Short is clicky and broken up; long smears into a pad. Density is how many grains there are per second. A low amount is a few pinpricks, or a solid wash when you dial it up.

[3:22]The dice and the grain cloud

Next to the preset name, there is a dice button which rolls all the grain controls to something random. Right-click it to undo the roll if it lands somewhere you don't like.

Now, once you've been playing, you've probably noticed a cloud forming above your waveform. This cloud represents every grain that is playing in the granular synth. So the more grains that play, the more the cloud forms. You can change the color of the grain in the swatch at the top right corner. The cloud will also respond to the pitch of the note. So the lower the note, the lower the cloud. The higher the note, the higher the cloud.

[3:59]Jitter, spread, scan

By default, the grains start from the same place. But using jitter, you can randomize where each grain starts. Use spread to widen the sound and throw the grains across the stereo field. And scan sets the read point moving on its own. One crawls forward at the sample's own speed, and anything negative runs it backwards.

[4:43]Shape and magnet

You can also adjust how the grain fades in and out with the shape knob. All the way down is smooth and clean. The center is a flat top that leaves the middle of each grain untouched. Past the center, it rounds back off into a soft bell.

Magnet pulls the grain start time to the detected transients. Murmur analyzes the file when you load it and marks every hit, which are those amber ticks.

[5:19]Slices

Slices decides how sensitive that hit detection is, so how many ticks you end up with. You can adjust these slices to hit on the detected transients or on a grid pattern of your choosing. You can also double-click to add your own slices and delete existing slices manually, or control them with the slice knob. And you can clear all the slices up here in the top right. We'll come back to slices in just a moment, but before we do, I want to explain the density modes.

[5:41]The density clocks

The clock above density decides when grains fire. Hz is the default, and it's free-running, so the density knob is setting the rate. Sync locks them to your tempo. And with repeat on, each grain is exactly as long as the gap between ticks, so they butt together and you get the sound chopped on the grid instead of a texture. Key hands the rate over to the note you play, which turns the grain stream itself into the tone.

[6:36]Slice mode

In slice mode, the keyboard maps to those boundaries from C1 up, one slice per key, so you can play the loop back in any order.

[6:48]Walk

Walk does it for you. Set your steps, hold a note, and the read head walks through the slices in time. Any step can point anywhere, and each one gets its own offset, level, pitch, and probability. So you can build a phrase that you never repeat.

[7:18]Tune, scale, cohere

Tune finds the sample's key and remaps the keyboard to it, so middle C plays what you expect. This can be auto-detected when the sample is loaded, but if the key is in the file name, it'll default to that. Otherwise, you can also change it to whatever you want.

Scale locks every grain to a scale, and cohere locks grain timing, position, and length to the sample's own pitch.

[7:58]Voices, glide, envelopes

You can change how many voices there are in the strip under the waveform, and when you're in mono, a glide knob will appear, letting it glide between notes, allowing you to play it more like a classic synth.

You can also customize up to three envelopes. The first envelope is the main amplification envelope, and you can drag the attack, decay, sustain, and release from the card on the right, as well as adjust the curves by dragging along the line.

[8:27]Morph

Morph is my favorite feature of Murmur. You can drop a second file on the bottom of the display. You'll see a purple rectangle in the bottom right light up, and morph wakes up. There are four morph modes you can choose from. These determine how each grain picks between the two sounds. Blend mixes both inside every grain, so the dial is a straight crossfade. Scatter gives every grain a coin flip, so the two sounds interleave at random. Alternate hands grains out in strict turn, so the weave is even and repeatable. And onset sends a grain to the morph layer when it lands near one of that layer's hits. Leave the match pill on that lane lit, and Murmur transposes the second sound onto the first one's key, which is usually the difference between a morph and a clash.

You can choose to have layer B's position link to layer 1 and play them at the same point. Alternatively, you can unlink them and get them to play at the exact points you desire. You can move the position of either layer independently, or you can move them together but at different points. You can also unlink or link these slices for each layer, so when they're linked, layer B and layer A will share the same slices, which will be dictated by either the transients on layer A or the grid mode you select. Alternatively, you can unlink them and have the slices decided by the transients of both layers independently.

[10:02]Modulation

In the bottom left of the plugin screen, you will see some modulation pills, which can be dragged onto almost any parameter and let you modulate almost anything. Once you drag one parameter, you will see a colored ring corresponding to the color of the pill appear around the knob. From there, you can drag that ring and adjust how much it will impact the parameter. If you want to remove a modulation, you can right-click on the parameter or the pill and remove the corresponding modulation, or all of the modulations connected to that parameter.

There are two LFOs, one random, four customizable macro knobs, a grain random, and three envelopes. The LFOs can be customized by going to the top right in the motion section. From here, you can change the rate and the shape of the LFO, and if you click this small draw button, you can draw your own shapes as well. The four macro knobs come preset with a few different options called swarm, drift, shimmer, and melt, but you can customize these to whatever you want. Simply right-click on the macro knob, clear all the modulations, and then you can change the name by double-clicking on it and pressing enter when you're done. The randomization macro can also be controlled just to the right of the four macro knobs. There is also a grain randomization module, which deals one fresh random value to every grain. There's nothing to be configured here.

[11:11]The grain filter and compressor

We also have a grain filter and grain compressor, which shape every grain on its way out. If you want to even out the loudness across the grains, so grains drawn from the quiet parts of the sample come up to meet the loud ones, adjust the across knob. If you want to compress the dynamics within each grain, flattening its own attack and decay as it plays, use the within knob. You can also adjust how the grain loudness is reshaped. Radical flattens this hard. Threshold behaves like a traditional compressor with auto-makeup. And inverse comes out backwards: loud grains end up quieter than quiet ones.

[11:49]Effects and the mod matrix

We also have some built-in effects, which you can access from the effects tab in the bottom right, which brings up an effects page. You can move these around as you please and turn them on and off with the dot in each module's header. And you can also drag the modulation pills onto them to modulate them as well. You can also bypass all the effects by clicking the bypass button at the top of this page. And next to this page is also the modulation matrix, where you can manage all your modulations in one place and adjust them, delete them, or add them as you please.

[12:15]Saving presets, and where to find me

When you land on something you like, save it as a preset. The sample is saved inside the preset file, so you can send one to a friend and it opens on their machine with the sound already in it. Or you can save it without the audio file if you prefer.

And that just about covers the main features of Murmur. I'd love to hear what you create with it, so please tag me and send it to me on Instagram or via email. I love seeing what people are creating with this tool. Let me know if you have any questions. I'm always here to help and always willing to listen to feedback. I have a feature request section and a bug reporting tool down at the bottom of the website. You can also email me at support@soundslikeyoumusic.com. You can chat to the chatbot in the bottom right corner of the website for quick answers.