Tasty Chips GR-2 Is a New Affordable Hardware Granular Synth
5,0 / 5,0 | 
Want a GR-MEGA but can’t afford it? Meet the Tasty Chips GR-2, a granular sampler with “largely the same abilities” as its big brother – but for $1000 less!
Tasty Chips GR-2
Tasty Chips’ GR-MEGA is the king of hardware granular samplers. I recently declared it one of five next-level hardware synths for its feature set and sound quality. It’s a fantastic instrument – but it also has a price tag to match. Now Tasty has announced GR-2, the follow-up to its intro-level GR-1 and the little brother to the GR-MEGA. The best part? It’s $1000 less than the MEGA with “largely the same abilities.”
Tasty Chips GR-2: A Next-Gen Portable Granular Synth
Tasty Chips is calling the GR-2 a next-gen portable granular synth and it’s not hard to see why. On first glance, you can see that its GUI has evolved from the GR-1. Smaller and with fewer physical controls, it instead provides a 7-inch touch screen for working with samples and getting around the menu.
The most important settings are available from the Quick Access menu buttons located across the top. You can make the settings full screen with a gesture, and deeper menus are accessible via the menu button. Tasty is promising reduced menu diving, with the deepest being one level down.
Interestingly, the internal firmware is based on that of the GR-MEGA. “Both can run the same patches,” says Tasty Chips. You get the four engines: granular, sampler, tape and spectral, with 128 grains per voice and up to 4000 grains system-wide. There are four layers to work with, with each layer granting you 16 voices of polyphony. That’s fewer than the MEGA but still nothing to sneeze at.
Tasty Chips GR-2: User Requests
The original GR-1 came out in 2017, so the company has had a lot of time to collect requests from users. With that in mind, Tasty Chips GR-2 adds built-in audio inputs, stereo samples, quick and easy saves, higher polyphony, effects, a spectral engine based on Paulstretch, and easier menus.
As for those effects, the granular synth includes chorus, a compressor, two types of delays, two distortion models, a flanger, a parametric five-band EQ, a reducer, two reverb algorithms, a ring modulator, and vibrato.
Here’s what Tasty has to say about the physical differences: “We chose encoders over potentiometers this time. We only use potentiometers for hard controls that cannot be modulated or controlled in any other way: master volume, for instance. The absence of vertical faders is notable, but the top side encoders cover for this. It’s not possible to change two LFOs at the same time, but you do have four LFOs and more options in the Quick Access pages.”
Tasty Chips GR-2: Connectivity
As befitting a modern hardware instrument, Tasty Chips GR-2 has plenty of connectivity options. For MIDI, it offers DIN MIDI in and out/thru ports, two USB-A 3.0 jacks and one USB-C for connecting to a DAW, with eight channels in and 10 channels out. On the audio side, there are stereo inputs and outputs. There’s also a headphone output with a dedicated volume knob.
Tasty Chips GR-2: Pricing and Availability
The GR-2 is currently available for preorder as part of a Kickstarter campaign in both black and silver colorways. The early bird tier units are all gone, but the general price of €849 is still very affordable, and even cheaper than the GR-1. The campaign will continue until May 27 2026.
Tasty Chips will also be at Superbooth this week, showing it off.
More Information
- Tasty Chips GR-2 Kickstarter page
- More about Tasty Chips
- More about synthesizers
- Buy synths at Thomann*
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