As part of their Sonic Drop initiative Avid have released the latest of their Sonic Drops of new content for Pro Tools - GrooveCell Spectral Particles.

Pro Tools Sonic Drop was announced as part of the Pro Tools 2023.3 release. At that time there were six ‘Drops’ of content. Pro Tools Sonic Drops are available to Pro Tools subscribers or perpetual licence holders with active update plans. This initiative was always presented as a rolling programme with monthly updates so the value grows over time.

What Is GrooveCell Spectral Particles?

GrooveCell Spectral Particles, a collection of 10 GrooveCell kits based around spectral and granular synthesis/resynthesis. In spectral synthesis sound is analyzed via an FFT (Fast Fourier Transform), which is essentially a snapshot of time versus pitch by breaking the sound down into its spectral components over the course of a window of time in which can then be manipulated individually. Granular works a bit differently, where sound is split into tiny particles called grains and the grains can then be manipulated. One could say granular is broadband whereas spectral is ridiculously multiband. In practice, spectral is smoother and blurrier sounding, while granular is more clicky and glitchy.

Granular is especially well implemented in modern synths such as Minimal Audio’s Current or Native Instrument’s Ashlight. Paulstretch is a well-known piece of freeware known for ridiculously long time stretching via a kind of spectral synthesis known as Phase Vocoding. Necessary to mention as well of course is iZotope RX. Spectral synthesis and granular synthesis are effectively natively build into every DAW these days as well. Pro Tools’ Elastic Audio contains both: the Polyphonic and Monophonic modes are granular, whereas XForm and ElastiquePro are spectral.

In creating GrooveCell Spectral Particles Matt aimed to create a collection of kits that abuses both forms of synthesis to create unique sounding drum kits that will stand out in your existing drum library and augment it with a palette usually reserved for those willing to go down a particularly nerdy wormhole. They’re clicky, smeary, and sometimes a little odd—and that’s the beauty of them. While these drums naturally excel at genres such as IDM, utilising them in more traditional forms of music will give you great results as well with some added flair. He programmed the GrooveCell kits as well to have all the drum sounds gated by the length you hold the pad as well, as opposed to a simple one shot that plays through each entire sample. Some of the samples are long (as is the nature of time stretching) and using the Amplitude ADSR to gate the samples allows you far more variation and dynamics. If you feel so inclined, do explore manipulating and creating sounds via spectral and granular synthesis yourself.

The Sonic Drops available so far are:

• Spectral Particles

• Analog Snarl - Sub Growl

• Loopcloud Selects Vol 1

• SynthCell Industries

• Tea Time Breaks

• Brutal Vegetables

• PurrCell

• Cinematic Selects

• Pummeled Piano

• Noise Engineering Modular Motifs

• Mike Avanaim Burnin’ Breaks

• Elektron Syntakt Beats

• Eventide H90 Drums

• Kitchen Kit

• Pumpkins

• Rob’s Basement Beats

• Ultra 808s

• Isorhythm

To find out more about how to get Spectral Particles check out the video above and to hear more about Sonic Drop listen to our podcast with Matt and Greg from Avid below. Sonic Drop is available to all Pro Tools users with active subscriptions or Update plans, Access Sonic Drop through Avid Link.