Alban Bailly has launched Jerrican, a free granular instrument designed to generate continuously evolving musical material. Available as a standalone application and plugin, Jerrican combines granular processing with generative musical behaviour across four coordinated voices.
Jerrican produces material as it runs rather than operating solely as a conventional sample-triggered granular instrument. Its four voices are intended to create an autonomous stream of sound with shared harmonic and timing relationships.
- Bass provides a metered walking-bass part.
- Ambient generates a slowly evolving pad layer.
- Haze produces a textured, gritty layer.
- Keys supplies chord-comping material that remains harmonically connected to the other voices.
Each control can be set to drift over time, allowing parameters to change gradually without further manual adjustment. The instrument includes 21 scale options, ranging from pentatonic scales and Western church modes to Hungarian, Middle Eastern, and Japanese-derived scales. A global Mode control applies the selected scale relationship across all four voices.
Jerrican includes factory presets and supports saving and recalling user presets. It also provides MIDI Learn and host synchronisation for use with hardware controllers and DAW sessions.
In AU and VST3 formats, the instrument supports per-voice output routing, allowing each of the four voices to be sent to separate tracks in a DAW while retaining their shared clock.
Jerrican is available for macOS, Windows, and Linux. It is provided as a standalone application, AU plugin, and VST3 plugin, with Linux support offered in VST3 format.
Jerrican is available as a free download, with optional donations.
Set a dev alert for Alban Bailly (Alioso).
AI assisted with DSP / audio code
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