Grone Drone Synth

Maneco Labs Grone is a drone synth voice with a built-in Mutable Instruments Clouds molded in a Eurorack module/pedal with an industrial look.

The Uruguayan developer Maneco Labs has released Grone, a new drone synth as a Eurorack module & guitar pedal. Interesting is here that it combines various sound shaping sections into a compete voice: a drone VCO, noise generator, MS-20 inspired filter, LFO, and a built-in Mutable Instruments Clouds. Yes, exactly, a Clouds processor in the Grone engine powered with the Parasites firmware.

The Drone VCO generates sound based on equations converted to analog signals. It features sixteen equations that can be selected by up & down switches and 4 LEDs indicating the equation number in binary mode. Three pots modify the numbers used by the equation, A0, A1, and A2, fourth pot sample rate controls pitch and speed of the oscillation. Further, there’s an output level pot for the oscillator and a dedicated jack for patching the Oscillator sound to external modules.

In addition to the drone VCO, there is a noise generator that offers white noise with a noise level pot and output jack. The next part of the engine is a characterful sounding Korg MS-20 inspired resonant lowpass filter with cutoff frequency & resonance control. The filter can be modulated via the two CV mod inputs. It also has a multi-wave LFO that is routed to MOD1 from VCF, rate, and waveform shape pots. Waveforms are: ramp up, ramp down, square, triangle, sine , sweep, random levels, random slopes.

The highlight of the module is a built-in Clouds effect processor based on the Mutable Instruments Eurorack module. Loaded is the beloved parasite firmware and features the same controls as the MI module: Input gain, position, size, density, pitch, texture, blend , switches for blend parameter and load/save, freeze control with indicator led , same display as MI original, dedicated audio input jack (mono) stereo output and control inputs for v/oct and trigger.

In all of a nice drone synth voice, especially one that has a crazy, industrial-inspired faceplate. In terms of sound, it can also convince with deep drones, soundscapes, and textures.

In Short:

• Eurorack module/pedal
• drone voice oscilllator
• MS20 inspired VCF
• multi-waveform LFO
• noise generator
• MI Clouds

Destroying Amps Gear Demos has done a couple of really good demos of this. Part one is below and Part 2 is on his YouTube channel.