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Particle modes

PARTICLES has three playback engines: GRAINS, LOOP, and STRETCH. All three read the same continuously-recording tape (the buffer you see in the waveform view), but they play it back in different ways. Switch between them from the ENGINE row in Studio.

Switching engines

Studio's PARTICLES area (the iPhone PARTICLES page, or the Particles column on iPad) has a row of pills: GRAINS, LOOP, STRETCH. Tap one to switch. Play's simplified Particles card doesn't carry the engine switch; if a preset uses LOOP or STRETCH, Play plays it that way, you just can't change the engine from there.

Switching engines doesn't touch the tape. The same recorded audio keeps playing, read back under whatever rules the new engine uses. Controls that don't apply to the engine you're on hide rather than showing dimmed, so the panel only shows what's live.

GRAINS

The granular cloud: three playheads scan across the tape independently, each spawning a stream of overlapping grains. This is the mode Particle Chimes has always had. POSITION, SIZE, DENSITY, TEXTURE, SPREAD, FEEDBACK, TONE, JITTER and SEED all work as before, and every head has its own SPD/DIV, PITCH, and PAN.

JITTER now reads out in milliseconds rather than a percentage: it's the same scatter control, but the readout tells you an actual time offset instead of an abstract number, so the same knob position means the same thing regardless of how long your buffer is.

LOOP

The tape becomes a looping delay. Each of the three heads is a tap: a fixed read point behind the record head, so playing a note repeats out of each active head at its own delay time. Head enable, PITCH, and PAN work as in GRAINS; DENSITY, TEXTURE, SPREAD, and JITTER are hidden, since nothing reads them in this mode.

  • TIME (the shared POSITION knob, and each head's own POSITION knob) sets the delay time. Free-running, it's a percentage of the tape. Under CLOCK = SYNC, each head's TIME becomes a whole-number multiple of the main synced division instead: 1x, 2x, 3x, or 4x. 1x is the main division itself; the three heads default to 1x, 2x, and 3x, so a fresh loop patch is already a simple multi-tap delay out of the box.
  • FREEZE stops the tape from recording and turns the current buffer into a repeating loop. Once frozen, LENGTH (the shared SIZE knob, relabeled) sets how much of the captured tape repeats, and each head's PITCH knob is relabeled RATE: it's the frozen loop's playback speed, since speeding up a fixed-length loop is the same thing as raising its pitch. Un-freezing goes back to a live, recording tape and LENGTH/RATE stop doing anything.

STRETCH

A pitched loop player. One shared read position moves across a span of the tape, and up to three voices sound it back at up to three different pitches at once, formant-preserving (a WSOLA time-stretch, so pitch and playback speed are independent).

  • ANCHOR (the shared POSITION knob, relabeled) is where that shared read position sits on the tape.
  • WINDOW (the shared SIZE knob, relabeled) is the stretch algorithm's own analysis window, a quality/character control rather than a time or pitch.
  • SPD is the playhead's speed as an absolute rate over the tape: 100% is normal forward speed, 0% parks the read position in place, and negative values run it backward. Entering STRETCH on a patch whose speed was left at 0 nudges it to 50% so the mode doesn't come in silent-feeling; touch it and that nudge is gone for good.
  • LENGTH sets the span the read position loops across, in the tape's own domain (the same seat LOOP's per-head LENGTH uses). Left alone it follows the shared tape length.
  • LOCK decides whether STRETCH is one chord or three independent voices:
    • Locked (default): heads 2 and 3 mirror head 1's shared loop transport, and each head's own PITCH picks a note of the chord. Only head 1 shows SPD; the loop's timing is one shared thing, voiced three ways.
    • Unlocked: heads 2 and 3 get their own independent SPD (and their own sync division under CLOCK = SYNC), so all three voices can run at different rates over the same underlying loop span, not just different pitches.

Every head keeps its own enable toggle, PITCH, and PAN regardless of lock state. Turning off every head silences STRETCH the same way it silences GRAINS or LOOP; nothing auto-re-enables a head for you.

FREEZE in STRETCH parks the tape's record head only. The loop transport keeps running either way, so freezing STRETCH doesn't stop or restart playback the way it does in LOOP.

What doesn't change

FEEDBACK, TONE, and MIX work the same across all three engines. FREEZE is on every engine's panel, doing a different thing in each: in GRAINS it parks the record head; in LOOP it's what turns the tape into a repeating loop; in STRETCH it parks the record head without touching the loop.

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