Auburn Sounds Releases Free Graillon Octaver VST/AU Plugin

Auburn Sounds released Graillon Free, a freeware feature-limited edition of their Graillon voice octaver effect for PC and Mac-based digital audio workstations.

Graillon Free is an interesting voice processing tool that mixes frequency-shifted copies of the processed audio signal with itself.

What’s particularly interesting is that only the vowels and voiced consonants are changed, whereas the rest of the signal is left unaffected, thus making the processed signal (especially speech) easier to understand. The result is an artificial and somewhat robotic-sounding version of the original voice, which can work really well for achieving certain types of effects.

In order to reduce latency, Auburn Sounds have decided to use frequency shifting instead of pitch shifting. This makes the higher notes sound particularly disharmonic, somewhat similar to ring modulation. The CPU hit is around 1% on a quad core processor, which is an excellent result.

Compared to the full version of Graillon (priced at €29), the freeware edition features only a couple octave sliders in addition to the input/output gain, placebo, mix, and low cut controls. The full version includes an extra couple of sliders that control the fifths across two octaves.

As a result, the effect can be pushed even further with the full version of Graillon, although the freeware edition can still lead to some interesting sounding results.

The plugin is definitely worth adding to your sound design toolbox if you’re in need of a freeware tool for turning regular vocals into slightly artificial sounding noises.

Of course, it can be used on other types of signals as well, even on synthesized sounds that could benefit from a bit of sound mangling. In the manual, Auburn Sounds recommend using Graillon on tiger roars, so there’s an interesting tip as well.

UPDATE: Auburn Sounds released the Graillon 2 Free plugin which is included in our free autotune article.

Graillon Free is available for free download via Auburn Sounds (4.47 MB download size, ZIP archive, 32-bit & 64-bit VST/AU plugin format for Windows & Mac).