Playing in an electronic music band, I’m always happy about new gear. One essential job I have in our performances is to play funny samples during the drop. To do so I was looking for a device that is basically a batterypowered soundmachine with some buttons and the possibility to assign samples to the buttons and play them. I was searching for a device for a while, and couldn’t find it. There are many devices like the Volca Sample that include a sequencer and are optimized for playing short percussion samples. Those devices had awesome features like pitch control and effects, but most of them didnt support long samples longer than a few seconds. Usually the memory was limited to a few minutes of sampletime overall.
After a while I found the Bastl Instruments MicroGranny which looked pretty much like what I’ve been looking for. It’s a granular sampler which means it can play samples at different speeds and it dan chop the sample up. This can create some pretty crazy sounds, but it can also be used just to play some samples.
Still this wasnt a perfect solution to me. It featured 6 buttons, and a set of 36 Presets containing a sample for each button. The display has 3 digits and displays each sample with two characters. It can take a limited amount of samples that must be in a specific wav format and names AA.wav to ZZ.wav. This means I cannot refer to a sample by name, but I have to remember the code for each sample. Same is for presets. This is a huge drawback in comfort. The samples had to go on a sd card which was also annoying and lead to me updating samples quite rarely. Pro again is, that it’s easily battery powered and super stable.
To at least ease up the updating process I developed this tool which stores an additional file on the sd card that contains the original filenames. It also automatically renames the files on transfer to the above naming convention. Same is for Presets. It supports all parameters. Only thing not implemented yet is the conversion of the file to the correct wav format, this needs to be done in a separate software.
This tool made it a bit easier to update and manage the samples, and it improved my python skills a lot. If you own a MicroGranny, give it a shot, it makes life much easier! 🙂
