Terrarium: Nebuale v2 Granular Looper Pedal

[Depattern]

Build Rating

5.00 star(s)

Finished a port of the Qu-Bit Nebulae v2 granular looper to a Terrarium with a Daisy Seed3. Phase vocoder and granular processor running in parallel off a shared 120-second live buffer, blended between them. The same architecture as the module



Ported from Qu-Bit's actual Csound source (MIT licensed, on their GitHub) rather than reimplemented from the manual, so the density curves, grain windows, blend laws and mincer FFT settings are all transcribed values. There is also a branch that picks up alex-thibodeau's blend rework from a llllllll thread a while back, a 2-way engine crossfade with dry on its own control, which lets the vocoder and grains sound together. Stock live mode never lets them overlap. That branch is less developed than the main one



Seed3 works fine on the Terrarium. Drops straight in, no changes

Six knobs with a shift page gets all the module's controls plus an LFO on read position, an output level and a dub level. Center-detent pots on Speed and Pitch, remapped so the detent lands on unity. Window sits on a toggle, expodec or bartlett

I got the leds backward and the decal on my pedal is an old version of the controls, so once the Terrarium pcb is back in stock, im going to build a second one with black powder coated enclosure, black toggle switches, multi-color rgb leds so rec lights red, playback lights green, and bypass is blue (the og Qubit Nebulae v2 eurorack module has blue and white leds). But everything feels very nice here. recording is perfect, the granular and phase vocode mode sounds incredible and identical to the module, the soft touch SPST footswitches feel much nicer than 3PDT when using your hand rather than your foot, the secondary shift function toggle feels very natural and ive already built muscle memory for it after like 2 days. The freeze mode on a toggle switch is actually preferable in my view to the push button functionality of the module


Source, firmware binaries and build notes: Github

 

[OD is Glorious]

Looks great!

 

[Depattern]

thanks man, i dont know why the decal is scratching off at the right edge, maybe not enough clear coat this time. never had that issue before but im rebuilding anyway and touched it up with some paint marker. the label isnt as bold as the new iteration and the labels are outdated now after a few upgrades and feature additions/secondary toggle adjustments

so the new one should be much more readable and nice looking

i will post a video/audio demo once i get it edited. the kind of granular audio mangling i like is hard to illustrate since its more "experimental" sounding, so im trying to make a more easy to understand demo with a "1-2-3-4" vocal count so you can hear what is being manipulated and how.

the reason i like the nebulae isnt because it does Clouds-like ambient grainy reverb, its because it actually stretches and manipulates the audio before you even begin to tear it to shreds and turn it into floating glass particulate, or freeze it in time with independent speed/pitch controls, or start punching in overdubs, sound-on-sound style. its by far my favorite granular sampler ive ever used so this is really a dream for me to have it in this perfect format.

very playable, even performance oriented. its meant to be fiddled with, not something i'd put on the ground, but you can of course - just set the settings where you want and use it like a normal looper

i got rid of the functionality i never really used on the module version like sd card sample loading (not possible here anyway), stereo pitch deviation, alt firmware versions for different instruments and sampler types. but i did add a freq shifter in the most recent 2.2fw which i haven't had a chance to test yet. since i rarely use input gain (post ADC, obviously), i swapped out that secondary function for a freq shift knob