34Audiovisuals DroneDie is a new, authentic Grendel Drone Commander emulation for macOS, Windows, and iOS.
With SwarmaDie 2, the new developer 34Audiovisuals has today released a Swarmatron emulation, but that’s more.
34Audiovisuals, aka Diego Capoccitti, has today released DroneDie, another well-known drone synthesizer, as a virtual version.
34Audiovisuals DroneDie
DroneDie is an authentic emulation of the Grendel Drone Commander Classic analog drone Synthesizer for macOS, Windows, and iOS.
The Grendel Drone Commander Classic is a legendary Synthesizer among experimental musicians, known for its fat, characterful drones.
A unique feature is its design. The drone synth looks like a stompbox/FX pedal but is actually a Synthesizer. 34Audiovisuals has also adopted this form factor in the DroneDie app. The latter also offers a quite simple synth engine that is a lot of fun.
Like the original hardware, it consists of two oscillators (20-360 Hz) with PolyBLEP anti-aliasing and analog-drift simulation. You have square and triangle waveforms per oscillator with a continuous mix crossfader.
Heavy Filtering With Animation
Then, it goes into a filter where you have a pre-filter drive skrew that gives you warm saturation to heavy overdrive. The filter itself is a four-pole/24dB/octave Moog lowpass filter (Huovilainen model) with built-in tanh saturation.
The filter has high- and low-range modes, with the latter enabling filter self-oscillation, which is perfect for harsh drones.
To add movement, it also includes an LFO with a range of 0.05–10 Hz with click-to-ramp shape morphing, and DAW tempo sync.
Part of the original design and the emulation is a PLL pulse generator (×2 / ×4 / ×8 / ×16 multiplier) that emulates hardware lock-on behavior. This generates lovely rhythmic filter modulation locked to the LFO rate.
There is also an external audio input mode that lets you use DroneDie as a vintage ladder filter effect. 34Audiovisuals DroneDie also has full MIDI support with 2-note polyphony for OSC pitch, CC mappings for all 20 parameters, and mod wheel LFO control.
There are two benefits compared to the hardware pedal: you can use multiple instances of it as plugins on your computer or iOS device. Secondly, you can save your favorite settings in presets.
First Impression
The original Grendel Drone Commander hardware is very popular among drone music fans. I’m curious to see how good the emulation is and whether it can compete with the original.
It’s not easy; the Grendel is simply a monster that outputs deep, beefy, slowly evolving drones and textures.
34Audiovisuals DroneDie is available now for 9,99€. It runs as a VST3, AU, and AAX plugin on macOS (native Apple Silicon + Intel) and Windows.
The iOS version with macOS support is now available on the Apple App Store for $4,99/5,99€, with AUv3 plugin support.
More information here: 34Audiovisuals / Apple App Store
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