Halide

Halide — Granular Smear & Spectral Wash

A grain cloud that feeds its own spectral ghost — dissolve the actual sequence of grains, not just the source.

Halide runs a 256-voice granular cloud into a Paulstretch-technique spectral smear — in series, not parallel, so SMEAR doesn't add a second layered effect, it dissolves the grain cloud's own output into slowly evolving, phase-randomized spectral fog. Feed it anything: a chord blooms into an evolving pad, a vocal line sings alongside its own harmony, a drum loop dissolves into an ambient wash that keeps breathing long after the source stops. Everything — density, size, shape, pitch, feedback, motion — shapes the fog, because the fog is made of the cloud.

Core Signal Path

• 256-Voice Grain Cloud — density and size fully decoupled, a bipolar SHAPE control running rexpodec Gaussian expodec (swell, fog, or pluck character), and a single SEED macro that scales timing/pitch/pan jitter together as one "character" axis.
• Serial Spectral Smear — the grain cloud's own output feeds a from-scratch Paulstretch-style engine (phase-randomized FFT resynthesis, pitch-locked crossfades on every re-anchor) — stretch 1–100×, selectable FFT window from watery-small to choir-huge.
  
• Musical Pitch Mode — flip PITCH into an interval/chord selector (14 entries: intervals, triads, sus4, 7ths, and a bright SHIMMER stack) and every grain randomly picks a chord tone, so the cloud sings a harmony around whatever you feed it — no key entry, the source is always the root.
  
• Feedback Through the Whole Chain — repeats re-pass through the grain engine and the smear both, so FEEDBACK builds shimmer (PITCH +12) or murk (PITCH −12) with each pass, not just a repeating delay.
  
• Freeze + Motion — freeze the buffer and let MOTION auto-scrub through it for infinite, hands-free evolving pads from a single held instant.

Built to Watch, Not Just Hear

A live buffer waveform display shows the write head, the TIME playhead, and every actual grain spawn as a blooming, fading ember — amber cooling to redscale over each grain's lifetime. It's not a generic meter; it's a direct readout of the cloud actually happening in real time, including exactly what SMEAR is currently dissolving.

Highlights

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• Ducked, equal-power Mix — the fog displaces the dry signal rather than stacking on top of it, so both extremes (bit-perfect dry, full wash) stay pure.
  
• Loudness-matched wet path — grain window energy and a slow servo both compensate automatically, so MIX behaves predictably at any SHAPE or SMEAR setting instead of getting quieter as the texture changes.
  
• Pitch-locked spectral wraps — the smear re-anchors without the pitch clash that plain crossfading between differently-pitched material would cause.
  
• BPM-syncable MOTION and FREEZE, for scrubbing and rhythmic texture work locked to the host tempo.

What It's For

Ambient pads and evolving washes from static sources, granular vocal and lead harmonization, shimmer/murk feedback textures, freeze-and-scrub sound design, and any material that needs to dissolve into something that keeps moving after the input stops.

Halide is donation-ware — free to use, no strings attached. If it earns a place in your workflow, a tip is always appreciated: buymeacoffee.com/brittnell

Format: VST3 (Windows & macOS) | Current version: 1.0.1.