Arturia's new Fragments plug-in is a granular processor designed to completely transform whatever you throw at it. A “dreamy, powerful, transformative” effect, Fragments chops your audio up into tiny segments, or grains, and re-orders, reverses and generally mangles them in real time to produce sounds quite unrecognisable from the input.
The first thing your audio will meet is the Buffer section, which is where you can define the grain length, amount of feedback, customise the buffer duration, apply a Freeze effect, and set the global wet/dry mix. Thence it travels to the Grain Capture module, which offers controls for grain playback speed, transient shaping, grain quantise and so on.
The Grain Release panel is where the action happens. It presents “an array of parameters and responsive options that give you full control over every aspect of the newly-created grains’ behaviour, from shape to play direction to density — and far beyond.” Helping you make sense of what it's doing to your audio is a natty 3D visualiser, which changes in real time in response to the output.
We're on more familiar territory with the Pan & FX module, which offers up randomised grain panning, tempo-sync'ed 3D panning, and two effects slots for traditional treatments such as LFO filtering, a tape-delay effect, stereo flanger and so on.
Finally, the Advanced Controls pane at the bottom of the UI offers parameter modulation options (including an envelope follower), a step sequencer, and the ability to set up macros — which can themselves be modulated.
Arturia Fragments is available now, and priced at €99. To get a sense of what it's capable of, check out the introductory video below.
