Tasty Chips GR-MEGA

A hardware granular synth and sampler from tasty-chips (Tasty Chips Electronics), €1,500 + VAT. It is the spoke’s first clearly digital / DSP instrument — where filtopia and cyma-forma-alt are all-analog, the GR-MEGA’s whole premise (granular-synthesis) only exists in the digital domain. The source is a Firmware 1.7 update that reworks the granular engine.

The instrument

• Architecture: four multitimbral layers, 20 voices of polyphony per layer, up to 5,000 grains total.
• Five engines: classic sampling, granular sampling, tape mode, granular slice, and a spectral phase vocoder — several ways to slice and resynthesize recorded audio.
• Interface: 7-inch screen with knobs and a slider.
• Modulation: four LFOs, four envelopes, four step sequencers, and a routing matrix (20 sources → 100 destinations) — another instance of the spoke’s modular-routing thesis at large scale.
• Effects: four simultaneous (delays, reverbs, dynamics, distortion); a 64-step sequencer (7-note poly/layer).

Firmware 1.7 — the granular rework

Grains are now visible across all four layers at once, plus new controls: pan spray, pitch spray, patch spray (randomized scatter of grain parameters), pitch quantization with user-defined scales, an exclusive granular filter, a multi-band resonator effect, and a reworked file system.

Two of these rhyme with existing spoke nodes. The “spray” randomizers are the same idiom as beast-repeat‘s “spray” — controlled randomness as a creative control, showing up independently in a granular synth and a glitch effect. And user-defined scales echo cyma-forma-alt‘s built-in microtuning, so alternative tuning is now a recurring feature, not a one-off. Gearnews product coverage → T3.