User Manual

5
Introduction
Thank you for purchasing the Particle 2. I designed the original Particle in 2010 and released the first
batch in 2011. I drilled, painted, labeled, soldered, and assembled those first pedals in my garage and a
spare bedroom. Thanks to the support of experimentally-minded musicians throughout the world, Red
Panda has been able to grow to a small team and continue to work on hard, interesting projects.
My goal with the original Particle was to take granular synthesis and map it to a real-time eect that
was easy to understand and control. Some of it’s limitations - and character - came from finding clever
ways to do things like reverse delay and granular playback on the Spin FV-1 DSP chip.
New in Version 2
The Particle 2 uses a much more powerful processor, and is a full-fledged granular processor capable
of generating dozens of simultaneous grains. It keeps the immediacy and control of the original Particle,
with improved fidelity, usability, and tweaks some of the knob responses. A primary goal was to make it
more pedalboard-friendly and easier to use on tour.
Some of the improvements include:
Smaller enclosure, with all jacks on top
Stereo (TRS) input/output
Presets (4 on front panel, 127 via MIDI)
Soft touch switches
Momentary freeze footswitch
Tap tempo with note divisions
Higher sampling rate
Higher headroom
Better signal-to-noise ratio
Improved pitch shifting
Longer delay time
Longer maximum grain size
More simultaneous grains
Additional parameters
Ability to combine parameters from dierent modes
USB MIDI
Multi-purpose control port for expression pedal, CV, remote switches
Expression pedal can be assigned to any combination of parameters
USB firmware updates