Musician and composer Alban Bailly has released a free granular synth that generates its own evolving composition rather than waiting to be played.
Jerrican builds 4 voices from clouds of overlapping micro-grains: set the ranges, hit play, and it starts generating on its own within those boundaries, never repeating the same result twice from the same settings.
Every knob can also drift on its own over time, so the instrument keeps moving without further input, closer to designing a small ecosystem than programming a fixed pattern.
It’s not a preset-browsing rompler and it’s not a sequencer looping a pattern back at you. It’s closer to designing a small ecosystem — you shape the tendencies, Jerrican lives inside them.
Jerrican features
- Four distinct voices: Bass (metered, walking), Ambient (slow-evolving pad), Haze (gritty, textured), and Keys (chord-comping, harmonically locked to the rest).
- Self-drifting parameters for continuous, hands-free evolution.
- 21 scales under one global Mode control, from Pentatonic and the Western church modes to Hungarian, Middle Eastern, and Japanese-derived scales, with all four voices staying in key together.
- Per-voice output routing (AU/VST3) to separate DAW tracks, without losing the shared clock that locks the voices together.
- Full MIDI Learn and host sync.
- Factory presets plus a save/recall system for building a personal library.
Jerrican is available as a “pay what you like” download (including free, suggested €15 donation). Also available is Marmite, a generative drum machine that rolls the dice on every beat. Both plugins come in VST3 and AU plugin formats and as standalone software for Windows and macOS.
More information: Alban Bailly
