GLOW Review

Lese have hooked me up with their granular effects plugin Glow, they have been on my radar since their free plugin Codec. Glow is a three channel granular plugin with three additional effects and a cube shaped performance controller. I love the choice of a strong yellow for the front panel UI color, I feel that different UI styles can inspire workflows and new creative ideas. The other pages are pastel pink and blue, paralleled by the color scheme of the performance cube macro section. You can assign macros however you like, but keeping with this system can create a nice consistency among preset design. When browsing presets the UI goes blurry, this makes presets a bit hard to read over the background, but it’s still a neat effect that adds to the vibe.

Each of Glow’s three granular engines can be set to cloud or stream modes, for different textures. You have all your typical granular parameters and a nifty “freeze” section. This freeze section can be used for granular feedback, or to trigger buffer freezing at either a fixed rate, or via a volume threshold. You can even trigger the freezing via the side chain input, perhaps you want grains to freeze along to a kick drum, or whenever a particular track element comes in.  The minimum grain length is a bit on the longer side, going down only to 25 ms, this limits some of the sound design capabilities of Glow. As for modulation, there are four MSEGs available, these include various draw modes, or you can create your own curves to assign across Glow. While random motion options would be nice, drawable LFOs give you very customized control over parameter motion. 

Glow also offers three effects, these run in series after the grain engine and can be a nice way to add some finishing touches to a preset. These effects include delay, crunch, reverb, chorus, and compressor. The crunch effect provides a nice variety of distortion types making Glow useful for gritty textural granular processing. Obviously the delay, chorus, and reverb are usefeul for more ambient approaches, and the compressor is great for glueing everything together. The performance section is really neat, I love the cube design, it looks like something out of an Ikea instruction page. Normal XY control is available via the mouse, with Z axis being controlled by scroll wheel, unfortunately you can not control all three at once, and I wonder if this is an oversight, or possibly a technical limitation.

I think Glow is one of Lese’s most ambitious plugins yet, lots of layers and tabs and modulation going on with this one. I do like how minimal their designs are, and they have a strong sense of visual appeal. If this is any sign of what they have in store for the future, they are a smaller company worth keeping an eye on. I always love seeing new granular plugins, it seems like each one attempts to apply granular technique is according to a unique methodology or process. 

You can pick find GLOW from Lese’s website: https://lese.io/plugin/glow/