Grone Drone Synthesizer Voice (Pedal)

Maneco Labs Grone Drone

With its built-in LFO, MS20-style filter, multiple waveforms, and—believe it or not—Clouds, the Grone Drone from Maneco Labs is a beast of a drone synth and effects pedal. Broken up into five sections, this highly playable effect creates thick, undulating walls of crisp drones, warm chaos, and anything in between. An audio input feeds your signal through the Filter and the Clouds sections, both featuring individual bypass footswitches. Based on the classic MS-20 resonant lowpass filter design, the Grone has a lovely warm sound that can get quite aggressive. A built-in LFO with selectable waveforms modulates the cutoff and gives the audio signal a wonderful motion. When combined with the classic Clouds sound of washed out glitchlets, you get a texture machine that can create dreams or nightmares.

With Clouds, you get access to all the parameters via small pots; a large knob is in control of the Pitch and the firmware uses the Parasites version which adds additional features such as a resonator and trippy reverb. The fun only begins with the input: there’s a complex oscillator section that also combines with the input and goes through the Filter and/or Clouds, complete with its own footswitch. This lets you dynamically punch in the oscillator for thick drones or rhythmic undulations. Using the three different algorithmic pots assigned to the oscillator, you can dial in static or living textures, as each control affects different parameters for each of the 16 different sonic equations. This makes for a fun, immediate exploratory sound session from the moment you engage the pedal. Two expression pedal inputs for controlling the Filter Cutoff and Oscillator Sample Rate complete this highly interactive instrument’s offerings for external engagement. Versatile and fun, the Grone Drone pedal from Maneco Labs is a great addition to your signal chain if you want unique textures and haunted atmospheres.

Grone Drone Features

• Desktop drone synth
• Includes port of Mutable Instruments’ Clouds
• 16 banks of algorithms for the Oscillator
• 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
• Footswitches for bypassing Oscillator, Filter and Clouds
• Dedicated Freeze footswitch for Clouds
• 2x Expression pedal inputs for Sample Rate and Filter Cutoff
• LFO normalized to VCF cutoff