An Overview and Review of Luna

There’s still time to enter the Luna song challenge! The challenge ends on April 2nd – check out this thread for all the details on how to enter and win!

Videos:

 

The Minimoog Voyager was first released in 2002. In many eyes, it was an instant classic. It aimed to replace the original Minimoog, which had ended production just over 20 years earlier in 1981. But beyond just replacement, the Voyager sported a few modern upgrades to the original Minimoog, an X/Y touchpad and MIDI in and out among them. But for most people, the Voyager stayed out of reach due its price tag (starting at around US$3000), size, and overall complexity.

Luna is a synth that brings the sounds of the Minimoog Voyager back to Earth in the Rack Extension format so we can all enjoy it. Built off of 92 multisample sets, Luna can create an extremely flexible variety of sounds with its two engines A and B. The samplesets are categorized into the following categories: bass, key, lead, osc., pad, and SFX (special effects). Purely on their own, the samplesets which power this synth are impressive. They have a very distinctive analog ‘grit’ and they create a very solid base to shaping your patches.

It should also be noted that while the original Voyager was monophonic, Luna is fully configurable to be mono- or polyphonic. In fact, Luna has very little in common with the Minimoog Voyager besides the sounds – Luna is not meant to be a recreation. Taking the sounds of the Voyager and combining them with the power of digital signal processing allows Luna to throw off the shackles of hardware limitations and act as a much more creative and flexible tool.

Both engines A and B have their own set of controls, then there is a global effect section as well as the standard performance section. There are several nifty features included, making Luna appealing to synth tweakers. There is a curve knob for the attack and decay on both the amp and mod envelopes, allowing those parameters to have a logarithmic or exponential shape, similarly to eXpanse. A safe limiter is included to ensure that the level of the synth won’t go above 0 dBFS. For reverbs, Luna offers both an algorithmic reverb and a set of great and varied convolution reverbs (there are 31 convolutions available). Also included is a set of great insert effects independent to each engine. In the performance section, there is a key split option to split engine A and engine B at C3, and the aftertouch meter is a welcome addition. The link options allow users to make changes on both engines simultaneously. The flexibility on this device is insane.

The aforementioned link option is especially useful since oftentimes when using both engines of a synth, you want to make sure that parameters such as the amp envelope, LFO settings, etc. are identical. Link makes that very easy to achieve without long and painstaking knob adjustments. Further, you can choose to link some sections and still keep other sections unlinked, which lends itself well to creating varied and evolving sounds.

Overall Luna feels sleek and easy to use. The interface is absolutely amazing, and makes it very conducive to find what is needed with no fuss or hassle. It’s a joy to use. I found myself flying around the interface to tweak sounds to exactly what I needed. Everything is very intuitive and if I had an issue determining exactly how something was affecting the sound, the manual was a great backup that explained everything about the synth in detail (manuals for Rack Extensions are an easily-overlooked resource – seriously, check them out sometimes if you don’t already).

The Oscillator section offers all the standard controls, but it also includes something interesting in the form of the Trigger Delay knob. This causes the OSC/sample to start playing a certain time division after it’s received. Turning this on on both engines, perhaps with some delay thrown in the mix, can lead to some very cool rhythmic effects. You can also use it in combination with the oscillator tuning knobs to make a sort of arpeggio. There is also a Sample Start knob to define where in the sample the sound starts, which can add some variety – particularly to those samplesets that change over time.

All the filters sound great. Included are all the standard filter types: low pass (6, 12, 18, and 24 dB/oct), band pass, and high pass. One cool thing about this section is that the keyboard tracking knob can be turned up to 200%, making it so each note changes the cutoff frequency by 2 semitones. The issue I have with the filter is one that appears to be a limitation of MIDI generally, and that is that the cutoff frequency (one my favorite parameters to automate) can’t do continuous automation – it only does stepped. This sacrifice is due to the fact that MIDI CCs and automation in Reason use 7-bit resolution (128 values). It would be nice to be able to automate the filter cutoff within the synth, but I always have the Classic Filter from MagmaSonic to hold me over. Another method would be to use an LFO, which has higher internal resolution.

The insert effects sound killer. All four inserts carry their weight and offer further shaping of the sound beyond the standard filter and amp envelope. The insert effects available are, in order: EQ, distortion, phaser, and chorus. My only gripe with this section is that the insert effects cannot be reordered. Luckily (or more likely, purposefully), they are placed in a logical order such that I haven’t actually felt the urge to change them. They all have a unique character, and I find myself throwing the knobs all over the place just to see what kind of sounds I can get out. I particularly like that the two mid bands of the EQ both go from 40kHz to 16kHz – it drives me nuts when bands are limited in frequency range. The distortion has a great character, and I found it particularly useful to have both a wet and a dry knob instead of just a mix knob.

The mod matrix is now a standard inclusion on many Rack Extensions, and it is welcome here. It has six slots, with each source able to go to one destination. That isn’t as fleshed out as on other synths, but so far I haven’t filled up the mod matrix and I haven’t missed having multiple destinations. I wish the destination list included parameters of the insert effects, but it’s also something I can live without. It’s also important to note that since the engines are independent, you actually get six slots for each engine for a total of twelve sources.

The global effects section is cleverly implemented with each engine having two Send FX knobs that send each sound to the reverb and delay. The delay has your standard time, damp, and feedback knobs, along with sync and ping pong. The reverb really stands out, with an option to switch between algorithmic or convolution reverbs. Here we get halls, rooms, springs, plates, and an FX convolution. Finally, we move to a global compressor before hitting the safe limiter (if enabled) and out into the world. The compressor sounds quite nice, and has all the controls you would expect to see. The only thing I wish on this is for a meter indicating gain reduction being applied to the signal, to quickly apply make up gain. As it is, however, it’s easy enough to turn the compressor on and off to match the volume by ear.

 

Although as a ReasonTalk staff member I can’t enter the Luna challenge, I couldn’t resist making something that I would enter. Check it out here:

 

This synth managed to handle everything I threw at it, and I’ve only scratched the surface. It is not CPU-heavy at all, so you can easily fill up your rack with Luna. As you can see from my song video, I used mostly presets, and those sound great as well. You can use them as-is or use them as a jumping off point for your own patches. I especially enjoyed using Luna as the carrier of a vocoder – you can get some really cool and wild sounds that way.

I think overall, I would describe Luna as quirky – in the best way possible. It is obvious how much time was put into this synth by the amount of detail given to every aspect. For a debut Rack Extension, Luna knocks the expectations out of the park and has me waiting with bated breath for future products. Further, it is obvious that Luna will not be soon (or ever) forgotten by the developers. András from PinkNoise Studio has been extremely on top of bug reports with fast response times. Being open, honest, and transparent about the issues facing a product is such a key component of building trust with us as hungry synth-buyers, and it does not go unnoticed. In the few short months since Luna’s release, it’s already seen a handful of small point updates to fix bugs and add new features.

Keep it up, András and the PinkNoise Studio team. I’m excited to see what you have in store for us.

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