Tasty Chips Electronics - GR-1

With the GR-1, transforming ordinary samples into atmospheric pads and textures, crazy leads or innovative percussion sounds is easy as pie. The granular instrument offers separate control elements for all important synthesis parameters. Its horizontally mounted slider, for instance, can be used to move freely trough a sample. – Extremely cool. A big TFT true color display visualizes waveforms and parameters. The GR-1 features 16 voices with 128 grains each. Its functional range is extensive, but not too extensive. 32 bit floating point algorithms and excellent converters guarantee high-resolution sound.

The GR-1 features a compact aluminium housing. Thanks to flat menu structures, the thought-through user interface and a large TFT display, handing the synthesizer is very intuitive. Samples are fed to the instrument via USB stick or hard disk. The other way round, it is possible to store any number of projects, each containing up to 32 sounds plus settings, on the mass storage device. In addition, there is an internal flash memory with a capacity of four gigabytes. By connecting an audio interface, musicians are able to record samples directly to the GR-1. A MIDI keyboard or sequencer can be used to control the instrument, but this isn’t a must. Up to four notes are playable simultaneously on the device itself.

The GR-1’s synthesis engine offers the following features:

• 16 voice polyphony
• 128 grains per voice (0.1 to 1000 grains per second)
• Move freely through waveforms with the horizontally mounted slider
• Directly accessible granular parameters: Density, Grain-Size, Spray, Pan Spray, Scan
• Tune potentiometer
• Other parameters can be reached via a menu
• Sine sub oscillator
• Low-pass filter with an edge steepness of -12 dB per octave
• Effect algorithms, for instance delay, distortion or bit crusher
• Two LFOs with routing functions (Waveforms: Sine, saw tooth, square, random)
• ADSR envelope
• Grain window envelope (Parameters: Sides, Tilt, Curve)
• Compatible audio file formats: Wav, Ogg, Flac, Aiff, Avr, XI

Using firmware updates, Tasty Chips is constantly updating the GR-1 with new functions. – Just check the manufacturer’s website from time to time.

Technical specifications of the GR-1 synthesizer:

• Quad core ARM Cortex-A running optimized Neon SIMD code
• 32 bit floating point algorithms
• 16 bit analog to digital converters with a signal to noise ratio of 106 dB
• 7” TFT true color display
• Maximum sample size: 10 MB
• Projects are subdivided into four banks with eight sounds each
• Standalone operation and MIDI controllable
• Rotary encoder for configuration and sample selection
• Ability to read and write any USB stick or drive: FAT, ExFAT, NTFS, HFS+, Ext4