Manneco Labs Grone Drone
A self-contained unit of a drone voice is what you get with the Grone Drone from Maneco Labs, with built-in LFO, MS20-style filter, multiple waveforms, and, amazingly enough, Clouds. Broken up into five sections, this highly playable voice creates thick, undulating walls of droney goodness, noisey chaos, and anything in between. The VCO has 16 different algorithms with three knobs that control the timbre of the voice and a fourth that is dedicated to adjusting the sample rate, letting you create gnarly, noisy sounds. The filter is an MS-20 resonant low-pass filter with a large cutoff control front-and-center; it has two small pots for resonance and modulation amount, which controls the built-in LFO’s influence. The LFO is normalized to the VCF with dedicated controls for the Rate and Waveform. A noise generator section sums with the VCO before going into the VCF and has a dedicated output jack.
The entire right side of the module is dedicated to Nimbus, their port of Mutable Instruments’ Clouds with the Parasites firmware. The same controls are present and the entire voice is normalized into the Nimbus, however, there is a mono input letting you feed in external sounds. There are no CV inputs for the parameters, emphasizing the hands-on performance capabilities, but there is a 1V/Oct CV input for the pitch and a trigger input. Also featuring dedicated outputs for the VCO and VCF, as well as an input for the VCF, you can combine the signal into complex patches is quite easy. Indeed, the Grone Drone from Maneco Labs is a beast in the best possible way and is a fine centerpiece for any experimentalist’s rack.
Grone Drone Features
- Full voice drone synth
- Includes port of Mutable Instruments’ Clouds
- 16 banks of algorithms for the VCO
- MS-20 style low-pass filter
- Noise generator
- Built-in LFO with 8 waveforms: ramp up, ramp down, square, triangle, sine, sweep, random levels, random slopes
- Outputs for VCO, VCF, Noise, and Clouds
- Inputs for VCF and Clouds
- CV inputs for VCO pitch, VCF cutoff, Clouds pitch, and Clouds trigger
- LFO normalized to VCF cutoff
