Welcome to Music Nation. Granular processing has always occupied an interesting corner of music production. In theory, it is one of the most powerful ways of transforming sound: take an incoming signal, chop it into tiny pieces, rearrange and stretch those pieces, change their pitch, smear them across time, and generally make a mess of the original recording.
In practice, granular effects can be difficult to control musically. They’re very good at producing something – getting that something to stay in key, follow your tempo and actually fit your arrangement is another matter.
That’s the problem Minimal Audio sets out to solve with Lucid. After a week with it, I’ve found it remarkably easy to get impressive results from, but surprisingly deep once you move beyond the presets. And that, perhaps, is what makes Lucid so interesting.
Granular, but with a musical agenda
At its core, Lucid is a granular processor. If you’ve used granular synthesis or effects before, the basic idea will be familiar. Your incoming audio is broken into small fragments – grains – which can then be manipulated in terms of pitch, timing, playback and position.
Where Lucid differs is in how much effort has gone into keeping those grains musically relevant. The headline feature is scale locking. You tell Lucid what key and scale your project is using, and its pitch manipulation works within those musical boundaries. Instead of shifting grains by arbitrary amounts and hoping they land somewhere useful, Lucid attempts to keep the resulting material in key.
There is also timeline synchronisation, which keeps the granular playback behaviour tied to your DAW’s timeline. This becomes particularly useful when you’re stretching, freezing or manipulating material rhythmically.
That combination is important because traditional granular processing can quite quickly become detached from the rest of a production. You might start with a perfectly usable vocal, string line or synth phrase, but once you’ve subjected it to enough granular processing, the result can have its own ideas about pitch and timing.
Lucid’s approach is essentially: yes, let’s destroy the audio – but let’s keep it in the arrangement while we’re doing it.
First impressions
Lucid is immediately impressive from a visual standpoint. The interface is modern without feeling like it has been designed primarily as a piece of interface art. Everything is sharp, responsive and sensibly laid out, and the entire GUI can be scaled to suit your screen.
There are lots of little details that make the interface enjoyable to operate. The controls have circular visual indicators around them, various elements communicate with the central Sync control, and the display responds dynamically to what is happening to the incoming audio.
The granular waveform display is particularly nice. A ghostly representation of the incoming material sits behind the processing and gives you at least some visual indication of what Lucid is doing to the signal.
I’m normally slightly sceptical of animated plugin interfaces. There are plenty of modern effects where the interface looks spectacular but tells you very little about the audio. Lucid manages to avoid that trap. The animation isn’t just decoration; it gives the processor a sense of movement and makes the relationship between the controls and the audio easier to understand.
There is also a very useful contextual help system.
Click the question-mark icon and Lucid enters a help mode where moving your mouse over a control produces an explanation of what it does. This is exactly the sort of thing I appreciate in a complicated plugin because it means you don’t have to constantly stop what you’re doing and open a manual just to remember what one parameter means.
And, as it turns out, you’ll probably still want the manual.
You might want to read the manual
Lucid’s manual runs to nearly 60 pages. That is either reassuring or terrifying depending on your relationship with manuals.
The documentation is unusually thorough and does a good job of explaining not only what the controls do, but how the various systems interact. That’s important because Lucid isn’t really a collection of independent knobs. Changing one aspect of the granular engine can have consequences elsewhere in the processing, and understanding that interaction is where much of the plugin’s depth comes from.
The manual also explains an important part of Lucid’s pitch behaviour. When you set the scale for your project, Lucid uses that information to keep pitch detection and shifting within the selected scale. If it can’t identify a single pitch – for example, with chords or other non-tonal material – it uses the scale’s root note as its reference.
That means the scale setting isn’t something I’d regard as an optional setup step. If you’re working with tonal material, it is worth getting right before you start exploring.
The presets are where Lucid really makes its case
There’s something I should probably admit at this point. I’d love to explain to you exactly how Lucid works under the hood, but even after reading as much of the manual as I could digest and spending a week working with it, I really can’t.
“Lucid reacts to the incoming audio in ways that are surprisingly complex”, and that’s about as far as I can confidently go before I start guessing. I can tell you what it does, what the controls appear to do, and – more importantly – what happens when you use them. But I’m not going to pretend I understand every stage of what’s happening between the input and the output.
The quickest way to understand what Lucid is capable of is simply to load something into it and start going through the presets. There are more than 300 of them, covering a fairly broad range of applications.
Some are conventional enough that you can immediately understand their purpose. Others leave you staring at the plugin wondering exactly what kind of processing you’re listening to.
The Delay and Ambient categories were particular highlights for me. There are some genuinely useful sounds here rather than simply a collection of demonstrations designed to show off how extreme the processor can become.
The Arp presets are particularly clever. They demonstrate one of Lucid’s biggest strengths: turning an otherwise relatively static piece of audio into something rhythmically active and harmonically interesting while maintaining enough control that the result can actually be incorporated into a composition.
And this is where I think Lucid becomes more interesting than simply “another granular plugin.” A lot of granular effects are excellent at making strange noises. Lucid is very good at making strange noises that sound as though they belong to music.
The 100% setting is ridiculous. In a good way.
At full mix, Lucid can get properly weird.
Feed it a sound and start pushing the various controls around and the original source can become almost unrecognisable. There are shifting textures, rhythmic fragments, harmonically altered material and enormous clouds of sound emerging from what was originally a fairly ordinary audio recording.
I spent quite a while simply experimenting with this. And that’s one of the few plugins where I’d actually encourage the “turn knobs until something happens” approach. Normally, I think that’s a poor way of learning a processor. If you don’t understand what the controls are doing, you’re essentially gambling with the signal. With Lucid, however, the unpredictability is part of the attraction.
You can spend an hour trying to understand exactly how the granular engine works, or you can load an interesting preset, start moving controls and stumble across something that makes you think, hang on, what was that?
Both approaches are legitimate. In fact, I suspect a lot of users will initially get more out of Lucid by not trying to understand it completely.
That sounds like criticism, but it isn’t really. There is something enjoyable about having a processor that still has the capacity to surprise you.
Where I found it most useful
The obvious temptation with a plugin like this is to go straight for the extreme settings. That is certainly fun, but it isn’t necessarily where I found Lucid most useful. I had some particularly good results using it as a subtle enhancement and widening processor. This was especially interesting with orchestral material.
Strings, in particular, can be surprisingly easy to damage with aggressive processing. Start throwing conventional chorus, modulation, delay and pitch effects at an orchestral section and it doesn’t take much before the sound starts becoming obviously processed.
Lucid can create movement and width without necessarily announcing that an effect has been applied. At relatively restrained settings, the result can be more about making the sound feel slightly larger and more animated than turning it into an obvious granular effect.
That was probably the biggest practical surprise of my testing. I’d initially expected Lucid to be primarily a sound-design tool. It certainly is that, but it also works surprisingly well as a more restrained colouration effect. That said, I wouldn’t recommend running an entire orchestral mix through Lucid at 100% unless your artistic objective is to make the orchestra sound like it has escaped from a malfunctioning time machine.
The extreme processing is excellent for special effects, transitions, pads, sound design and moments where you deliberately want to break the source apart. For more conventional orchestral production, restraint is your friend.
The price of all this control is complexity
There is a catch. Lucid is complicated, and I mean really complicated.
The preset system makes the plugin appear deceptively straightforward because you can load a preset and immediately get something impressive. But once you start attempting to recreate or deliberately manipulate those sounds yourself, the learning curve becomes apparent. There are a lot of things happening.
Granular size, timing, pitch, scale behaviour, synchronisation and the various modulation and processing controls all interact. You can certainly learn the system, but I don’t think this is a plugin you’ll fully understand after an evening of experimentation. The manual’s length is a pretty good indication of what you’re getting into.
This creates an interesting dichotomy. Lucid is easy to use, but considerably harder to master. That’s not the same thing.
You can open it, choose a preset and start making music immediately. But if your goal is to become the person who can look at an arbitrary source sound and deliberately construct a particular granular transformation from scratch, expect to spend some time with it. Personally, I think that’s preferable to having a simplified plugin that runs out of tricks after a few sessions.
Lucid feels like there is considerably more underneath the surface than you’ll discover in the first week.
CPU usage
The other practical consideration is CPU consumption. On my test machine, Lucid was using roughly 15–25% CPU, depending on what I was doing. That’s not insignificant.
It’s certainly not the sort of effect I’d casually put on 20 tracks and forget about. Fortunately, I don’t think that’s really the intended workflow anyway. Lucid is more likely to be used as a deliberate sound-processing stage on selected tracks, buses or effects sends. Still, if you’re working on an older machine or a particularly large project, CPU usage is something to keep in mind.
The good news is that you probably won’t need dozens of instances. One well-chosen Lucid instance can do quite a lot.
The updater is nicely thought out
One small thing that I particularly liked has nothing to do with the sound. Lucid has an automated update process built into the plugin ecosystem. Rather than having to repeatedly visit a website, find the latest installer and manually download it, the update process handles the download for you. Once you’ve quit your DAW, the updater application can complete the installation.
It’s a minor convenience, but these things add up. As someone who has spent plenty of time maintaining music computers, I appreciate developers who recognise that installing plugins is not necessarily the interesting part of owning them. Having used this pre-release version for a while, the updates when they came were painless and fast to apply.
So, who is Lucid for?
If you’re looking for a conventional delay, chorus, reverb or modulation plugin, Lucid isn’t really the answer. It’s a sound transformation instrument disguised as an effect. That makes it particularly attractive to composers, electronic producers, sound designers and anyone who regularly needs to take an existing piece of audio and turn it into something that wasn’t there before.
For cinematic and orchestral work, I think there’s a particularly interesting application. Lucid can create evolving beds, transitional textures and movement from material you’ve already recorded or composed, while the scale-locking makes it much easier to keep those transformations musically compatible with the piece.
But I wouldn’t buy Lucid simply because you want “a granular plugin.” There are plenty of granular processors around. I’d buy it because you want a granular processor that tries to understand the musical context in which you’re using it.
Conclusion
Lucid is one of those plugins where the first impression matters. Minimal Audio has taken an inherently chaotic form of audio processing and introduced enough musical structure to make it practical without completely removing the unpredictability that makes granular processing interesting in the first place.
The scale locking is genuinely useful. Timeline synchronisation makes the processor considerably easier to integrate into a production. The interface is excellent, the contextual help is thoughtfully implemented and the preset library contains a lot of genuinely usable material rather than simply 300 variations on “look what our algorithm can do.”
The downside is that Lucid is not a plugin you’ll completely conquer in an afternoon. There is a lot to learn, and the CPU consumption isn’t trivial.
But I’m not convinced either is necessarily a problem. Some plugins are designed to be understood immediately. Others are designed to reward experimentation over time. Lucid feels firmly like the second kind.
After a week with it, I still feel as though I’ve only scratched the surface. And perhaps that’s the best compliment I can give it. I haven’t reached the point where I’ve heard everything it can do and started scrolling through presets looking for something new.
Instead, I keep finding myself asking “What happens if I put this through Lucid?” – for a sound-design plugin, that’s a pretty good place to end up.
Minimal Audio Lucid is a seriously creative granular processor that manages something granular effects don’t always do particularly well: stay musical. When I want to take an existing sound somewhere unexpected – whether that’s a barely perceptible widening of an orchestral section or a completely unrecognisable rhythmic texture – Lucid gives me a remarkable amount of territory to explore.
The fact that I’m still discovering new territory after a week is probably its strongest selling point.
Head over to Minimal Audio’s website for full details
