JK's Sample Swarm

Sometimes too much control stifles creativity. Sometimes you just need to make a mess.

So clasp hands with chaos and sling sounds like Pollock slung paint. Turn a recording of yourself saying “ah” into a chorus of angels…or demons. Turn those found sounds from your kitchen into a clanking nightmare factory. Mash and mangle an entire folder of audio. Automatically cut and collage to your heart’s content – sometimes you just don’t care when or how your sounds are played, you just know you want hundreds of them playing at random times and random pitches!

Scribble on the walls! Bake mud pies! The results aren’t always pretty, but the process is fun.

But what is this module? Is it a looper? A granular device? A sample mangler? A noise maker? A blur effect? A glitchy delay?

Sort of. Well…not really. Well…sometimes.

At its core, JK’s Sample Swarm is an endlessly looping buffer to which you can write audio, with parameters to guide, yet not quite specify, how and when things are written. Potentially, one can write a lot of audio, overlapping itself until the sound sort of averages out into an endless blur. Transients eroded, your monument reduced to rubble. While originally devised for easily turning tonal samples into drones, and non-tonal samples into texture, the controls leave plenty of room for experimentation. Less extreme overlapping, options to only use small segments of source audio, and even ways to randomize the file used as source audio extend the possibilities to numerous other applications.

You can find the full manual at the JKphobic Modules website.

A simple demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4DXr7gitgw

As always, for questions, comments, requests, bugs, etc. you can reach out through the Cherry Audio forums, Voltage Modular Facebook Group, Voltage Modular Discord Channel, or email.

Changes - Version 2 - Jan 7, 2023

• Samples normalized and offset on input/load
• Replaced status LEDs with progress bar
• Pitch, pitch range, pitch detune parameters
• Volume variation parameter
• Normal/wide changed to stereo distance parameter
• Source slicing - start position, start variation, length, length variation, fade in, fade out
• ONCE and HOLD MS options for slicing (see manual)
• PROCESS button evolves into clear, replace, and add buttons
• Replace creates new output
• Add mixes new audio with existing buffer audio
• Input jacks to trigger add, replace, clear…and source randomization!
• Output length adjusted to be .1 to 20 seconds and can change even after process
• Crossfading old output into new output, 0 to 10 seconds
• Preview source sample slice with right-click
• Preview entire source sample with ctrl + right-click
• Amp jack now through-zero
• Arbitrary constraint on V/Oct input removed
• DC Filter on output
• Fixed clicking at loop point!
• Lots of other tweaks and internal stuff