Best known for its expressive controller gloves, Mimu is now stepping away from musical wearables for a moment to release Jellyfish, a “granular dream weaver” plugin.
So what does that actually mean? Essentially, you’re getting a granular synthesis engine that can accept real-time audio input and generate all-new sounds - drones, pulses, soundscapes and more.
The Jellyfish comes with a library of its own samples, and you can also import your own or use the aforementioned live audio option. There are two modes - Drone will keep looping the audio so you’ll always hear a sound (useful for pulsing effects) while in Event mode you’ll only hear a sound when you start interacting with the Jellyfish graphic that can be moved around the waveform to trigger different parts of the sound.
If you want to play The Jellyfish from your MIDI keyboard, you can use the MIDI Markers feature, which enables you to assign parts of your sound to the keys. You can either pitch a single sound across the keyboard, or assign different parts of it to different keys so that you can switch between them.
You get plenty of control over the granular engine, and it’s possible to adjust the playback mode and speed, too.
You can take a deep dive into Jellyfish in the video above. It runs on PC and Mac in VST/AU/AAX and standalone formats and costs £99. Find out more on the Mimu website.
