Neutral Labs Luna – a Lunetta-style CMOS synth

Logic, Unbound. Meet Luna. The first serious Lunetta synthesizer.

Look beyond clean waveforms and predictable polyphony. Luna will take you back to a time when digital didn’t mean perfect. It meant raw. Inspired by the subterranean DIY culture of the 70s and 80s, Luna is a love letter to the Lunetta machines of old: Living, breathing organisms built from CMOS logic chips. But where those machines were fragile experiments, Luna is a weaponized instrument of sonic confusion.

The Nervous System Exposed. True to the Neutral Labs philosophy, we don’t believe in hiding the magic behind an opaque face plate. Luna features exposed CMOS inputs and outputs right on the front panel. You’re not just patching cables, you are rewiring the brain of the synthesizer itself. Combine signals, bend logic, and physically intervene in the computation to create sounds that shouldn’t exist.

Rhythm is Timbre. Timbre is Rhythm. In the world of Luna, there is no difference between a sequencer and an oscillator. The same digital pulse that drives a bass line can be accelerated into a screeching lead or folded into a metallic drone.

5 oscillators provide the raw material. A chaotic array of logic blocks (XOR, NOT, AND, shift registers, counters, multiplexer) will chew up those signals and spit out complex, evolving mathematical noise.

Taming the Digital Mess. Raw logic can be harsh. To turn this binary chaos into music, Luna feeds its digital soul through 3 organic low-pass gates. These analog circuits impart a natural decay and percussive punch to the madness, transforming mathematical errors into bongos, plucks, and thumping basslines.

Drench it in Atmosphere. Once you’ve constructed your signal, destroy it again. Luna comes equipped with a suite of effects — distortion, delay, reverb, chorus, bitcrusher, phaser and more — to smear your logic into a wash of ambient bliss or gritty industrial texture.

Features:

  • 5 oscillators
  • logic gates (2 XOR, 2 NOT, 2 AND)
  • 5 logic blocks (5-step ring counter,4-bit binary counter, 2 shift registers, 4-channel multiplexer)
  • 3 touchpads that generate logic signals
  • 3 channels for audio manipulation (low-pass gates with adjustable decay and switchable trigger mode, gain, tilt EQ)
  • 13 audio effects that can be freely assigned to 2 effect slots running in series (drive, delay, reverb, 6 filter types, bitcrusher, phaser, chorus, comb filter)
  • CV control for effects and 2 oscillators
  • MIDI control over 2 oscillators, all 3 low-pass gates, and 3 logic outputs
  • 2 sequencers with up to 64 steps, syncable to clock or MIDI
  • audio output is headphone compatible
  • available as a desktop synth or 42 HP Eurorack module (desktop version comes with a 12-pack of black/gold braided patch cables)

This has just been released today. More info here.

Some demo videos will be out later today, and I’ll post them in this thread. Hope you like what you see and hear. Any questions or comments, feel free. :slight_smile:

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Looking great, love the endless amount of patching points, but also … Comb Filter …!!!

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This looks very cool! May I ask a question? Why are we unable to put the dekstop version in a eurorack case? Not a critique at all, just curious.

i think you may be mixed up, the desktop module can be racked, other modules cant be racked in the desktop module case without modification

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Yes, I should not type anything before morning coffee. I read incorrectly.

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Really enjoyed the video. Such an inventive machine the way everything comes together. I might have to learn how to solder and build one myself!

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It’s a tough order for your first soldering project, but doable if you have some patience.

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Holy shit.

I like this.

It’s brining my inner crakhead out.

Just thinking about this, plus a benjolin and a triple sloths.

Ticks every box for a small case of infinite chaos options.

Fuck.

Too busy.

Fucksake.

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Any word on pricing yet? I might have missed that…

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pricing

Shop links are online: Luna dealer list - Neutral Labs

More to follow in the coming days.

Luna will be there for you when it’s time.

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Looks real cool!

I tried to make somewhat of a copy in Bitwig grid to play with

If anyone else wants to have a go here it is!

Luna.bwpreset (74.5 KB)

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I just wanted to take a moment to praise your level of innovation. I follow you on Instagram, and I genuinely find it exciting to follow your projects. The market is pretty oversaturated with all kinds of synthesizers, so it’s really refreshing to see someone like you who truly breaks the mold of what’s expected, and does so in a desktop format, no less (I’m not into Eurorack, so I automatically miss out on a lot of the innovation happening there).
Every time I see what you’re making, I can easily picture Alessandro Cortini hunched over on the floor in his studio, just twiddling away on the synth :smiley:

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Thanks, that warms my heart! Just got a comment on Reddit accusing me (yet again) of plagiarism, so it feels good to hear something to the contrary. :slight_smile:

Some more stuff to come this year, and hopefully exciting too, so stay tuned! (Just gotta find a way to break into Behringer headquarters so I can copy some of their schematics first.)

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This looks so cool. I don’t have the soldering talent to build it sadly but amazing stuff

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Well, you can also buy it assembled of course. :wink:

Oh I didn’t see that! Is there somewhere in the UK that sells this?

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Full dealer list here.

Signal Sounds and Elevator Sound are selling the assembled version in the UK.

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Signal Sounds had them in yesterday at £649

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