Full Bucket Music: Grain Strain

German programmer and software engineer Björn Arlt began building VST plugins under the name Full Bucket Effects in 2010. Having been a musician and synth enthusiast from a young age, he was drawn to analysing and building software synths. He now offers both synth emulations and effects as freeware through his website.

Grain Strain is an envelope grain looping effect which captures a sample of specific length (a grain) from the input signal. The grain is looped for a certain period of time/samples (a frame). Once the frame has finished, a new grain is captured from the current input stream and looped etc. 

Features:

• Flexible grain looping with Sync-to-Host options
• Envelopes for both grains and loop iterations (frames)
• Grain Vocoder: Grain frequency control via MIDI (up to eight voices)
• Supports MTS-ESP by ODDSound dynamic micro-tuning
• MIDI Learn: All parameters can be controlled by MIDI CC
• Resizable user interface (not N version)
• Plug-in supports Windows and macOS (32 bit and 64 bit)

The software effect plugin is available for Windows (VST2) and Apple macOS (VST2/AU). It is written in native C++ code for high performance and low CPU consumption.