The boffins at Red Panda are all about pushing the boundaries of what can be done with natural, organic sounds. It’s just one of those pedals you have to hear to believe. You can then save up to four characteristics to recall at the tap of a button. From there, it’s up to you how much the pedal stutters, chops and changes, freezes, glides, distorts and melts away at your fingers. This takes everything from one to 10 in an instant but can also be used in an extremely beautiful, musical setting.Īt its core, the Particle 2 is a pitch shifter and delay, with eight wildly different voices to choose from as the base of your sound. Red Panda love a pedal that cuts up your guitar tone in unusual ways - the Particle 2 is the best example in the range. The Particle 2 is ingenious, inspiring, and endlessly fun.Absolutely bonkers. The R&D this design surely required more than justifies the $299 price. It has a vast repertoire of head-spinning tones. It’s easy to imagine some of these sounds finding a home in a relatively straightforward pop track. It’s no surprise that the Particle 2 can generate violent, chaotic sounds-it’s a granular delay! It’s more remarkable for its ability to wrangle this unruly family of effects into more subdued and musical contexts. (The parameter knob is an obvious choice.) There’s also a tap-tempo switch that doubles as a freeze control when held. You can pilot any one knob with a foot controller. The Particle 2 can store four settings in memory with a single button-push, or access 127 saved sounds via external MIDI program change commands. (Adapter not included.) You can’t use a battery.
The pedal runs on standard 9V power supplies. There’s none of that low-resolution bleating you often encounter in stompbox pitch shifters. In all modes, the Particle 2’s sound quality is stellar for its price range. Together, these knobs regulate the intensity of the Particle 2’s effects, permitting relatively subtle sounds that make this pedal more than a frantic noise bomb. The delay time and feedback controls do what you’d expect. Its results range from near-conventional echoes to thick harmonic soup. There’s an all-important wet/dry control. The remaining controls set the intensity of various parameters. It’s a long clip because there’s much to explore here-and because playing Particle 2 is fun. You hear the various modes in the demo clip. The intricacies of these effects are best understood by listening. The Particle 2 improves your odds of getting musically coherent results from granular delay’s anarchic process. The pitch modes manipulate tuning, LFO modulation, and grain density. Pitch mode randomly detunes echoes, while random mode scrambles the delay times. Reverse mode randomly reverses some slices. LFO mode expands and contracts the speed of the delayed signal. Layered behind your dry signal, its shimmering, blurry textures can be downright beautiful, like a pretty landscape viewed through a window on a rainy day.
The first mode, density, is the simplest, and probably the most utilitarian if you want unusual tones that still conform to standard chords and rhythms. The role of the adjacent parameter control varies from mode to mode. The crucial control is the 8-position mode switch.
This is not a pedal for the ol’ Tuesday night blues jam. Additionally, any of those parameters can be modulated, producing violent storms of sound. These slices are then subjected, independent of each other, to digital manipulation including time and pitch shifting, delay, reverse playback, phase manipulation, and more. Granular delays divide incoming audio into tiny slices-or particles, if you like. But it’s only existed in stompbox form for a few years.
#Red panda raster demo software#
The process has been available in music software for some 20 years via such programs as Native Instruments’ Reaktor and Cycling 74’s Max/MSP. (Skip ahead if you already know what that means.) The concepts behind granular delay/synthesis originated in the 1960s. But before proceeding, be aware that those destinations aren’t for everybody. Red Panda’s Particle 2 is practically guaranteed to take your tones to new places. You’re about to read a rave review of an innovative and inspiring pedal.
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