DeveloperDillon Bastan has just released Iota - a granular looping instrument for Max 4 Live which breathes some new life into sample based granular techniques.

Using graphical spectral selection techniques, familiar to those of you who know iZotope's IRIS and RX editors, its a creative way of selecting time and frequency based selections from within the loaded sample.

Here's how they describe the process.

You start by dragging a source sample into Iota from Live or your operating system – a beat, a vocal, a pad, a found sound – and selecting a region within it to be rendered as a continuous stream of tiny slices. Familiar graphical editing tools are then used to draw, move and resize 'boxes' in the spectrogram, each one defining the length and frequency content of a band-pass filtered loop in a clear and immediately representative visual manner. By arranging and overlapping multiple boxes, you can deconstruct, fragment and dice the original sample to as coarse or fine a degree as you like. Create lots of small loops to atomise and reimagine a percussion clip, for example, or a few larger ones to carve an orchestral string section up into a scintillating multi-dimensional ambience.

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