Catch a sound in mid-air and keep it there.

Feed in a vocal or a chord from your oscillator. SKIES records it into a buffer and plays it back as grains. A grain typically lasts between 1 ms and 100 ms, so the source dissolves into texture. Press FREEZE and that moment stays in the buffer while incoming audio is muted.

Shape the grains by hand or by voltage

POSITION picks the point in the buffer where grains start. SIZE makes them shorter or longer, and PITCH shifts them against the recording. DENSITY at centre stops the grains: turn it one way for regular grains, the other for random ones. TEXTURE morphs the envelope from square to triangle to a smoothed Hann shape. POSITION, SIZE and DENSITY each take CV from -8 V to +8 V.

Beyond grains: stretch, loop and spectral play

Hold PARAMETER for five seconds to reach three alternative modes. In pitch shifting and time stretching, TEXTURE becomes a low pass/high pass filter. Looping delay plays the buffer with no granular processing, and moving POSITION sounds like scratching vinyl. Spectral processing is made for open-ended experiments.

Save a texture for the next patch

SAVE/LOAD stores the buffer in a memory slot and loads it back later. Choose the quality: 32 kHz 16 bit stereo holds 1 second, 16 kHz 8 bit mono companded holds 8 seconds. Update the firmware over USB C with the SynthTribe app.