Intellijel Multigrain: Clocking Chaos and Grain Discipline

The heart of the video is the Sync Input, which allows Multigrain’s grain generation to be clocked from an external source. Once patched, every sound in a preset can have its grain rate follow the incoming clock, making synchronised granular textures possible. The process is straightforward: enable Sync via the ALT menu, patch in your clock, and the grains march in step with your system.

This synchronisation is per preset, so you can have different rhythmic behaviours across your saved sounds. The demonstration makes it clear that the Sync Input primarily affects the Rate control, turning it into a divider or multiplier of the clock. This means you can dial in anything from slow, spaced-out grains to frenetic bursts, all locked to your master clock—a boon for anyone who wants granular textures that actually groove.

Things get more interesting when you start linking controls. With Size and Rate linked, the size of each grain now determines the rate at which grains are generated. When Sync is active, this relationship snaps to clock divisions, creating stepped, rhythmic changes as you tweak the Size knob. The Rate control becomes a multiplier, letting you quickly move from one clock division to another, and overlapping grains become part of the sonic palette as you push the rate higher.

If you link Pitch as well, it starts to influence both Size and Rate, shrinking grains and increasing their rate as you raise the pitch. The video demonstrates how these interactions behave both with and without Sync, but the real magic is in how everything locks to the clock when Sync is enabled. It’s a patcher’s playground: overlapping grains, rhythmic divisions, and the ability to sculpt granular textures that are both precise and lively.

The video moves on to practical use cases, showing how Multigrain can be synced to external gear like Digitone via MIDI. Even when grains are synchronised, they aren’t phase-locked to the clock, which means you can get creative with manual triggering. By using the sound buttons or sending triggers to the Gate or Next inputs, you can reset the phase and start point of the grains, aligning them with your beat or deliberately offsetting them for polyrhythmic effects.

This approach turns Multigrain into a rhythmic tool, not just a texture generator. Regularly re-triggering the sound lets you play with Rate, Size, Wrap, and Scan to build complex, repeatable patterns. The option to reset grains even when unsynced opens up further possibilities for unpredictable loops and evolving textures. It’s a reminder that in modular, sometimes the most musical results come from a bit of manual intervention.