Red Panda Labs Particle Granular Delay

You'll have to ignore the chubby baby hands in the photo. Kids are curious. 

Wow, what a sound! I really wish I had this one back. In fact, one of the purposes of this blog is to ensure that I keep track of all the things I've used, loved, discarded, and immediately wanted back. That's the pattern, anyway.

The Particle is an utterly unique, idiosyncratic, complicated bit of gear. It is certainly not for everyone, but--if you have a use for glitched-out, drill'n'bass, random grain-shifting-and-pitch-shifted delays, there's really nowhere else to look. It can loop bits of audio while either simultaneously freezing them forever or obliterating them with its cold-hearted DSP.

This is a great pedal to run after loopers, especially if you run a stereo looper. One of my favorite tricks is to run an uncorrupted loop direct to an amp or audio interface, and to run the other half of the stereo signal in parallel into something like the Particle. You retain the rhythmic and harmonic content of the original loop, but you can also blend it with the aleatory of random pitch-shifting and granular delays.

Though they don't fit into the lexicon of guitar pedal controls, the parameters here are as minimal as possible while still offering maximum control over the Particle's prodigious sonic gifts.

Made in Detroit, I'll encourage you to buy all Red Panda Labs products. I'm especially curious about their new Bitmap bit crusher...a future post, I'll bet.