Nerve Audio Magnetar: a drone synth built for the dark side

So Nerve Audio dropped a new one. These are the folks behind The One. If you haven't tried it, it's hands down the best emulation of the Sequential Pro-One out there, modeled circuit-level down to the CEM chips. So when the same crew announces a new synth, I pay attention.

Magnetar is a polyphonic drone and sound-sculpture synthesizer, and it feels built for the dark side. Six latchable drone oscillators at its core, each tunable down to microtones across 14 built-in scales, with a lead section of up to 12 voices stacked on top. For industrial work this is the money. Dark evolving beds, detuned walls of tone, the kind of undercurrent that makes a track feel like it's breathing.

Then there's the filter: a Polivoks OTA. If you know, you know. The aggressive Soviet filter that sounds like it's chewing the signal. Low-pass, high-pass, band-pass, all of them nasty in the best way. Run the drones through it with the DRIFT, DRIFT RATE and WANDER controls cranked and you get unstable, alive-sounding horror textures before you even touch an effect.

The modulation is deep too: 8-slot matrix, 2 LFOs, 4 macros, XY joystick, envelope follower, pulsers, sample & hold, 4 MSEGs, and a 16-step sequencer. Seven effects on top, reorderable, feeding back into each other. This thing is built to get weird and stay weird, exactly what industrial needs.

Best part: you can try the whole engine right now in your web browser. No download, no install. Every control is live on the product page (preset library excluded). Just turn the knobs and play.

Launch price is 69 EUR (normally 109), one-time purchase, free updates, license validates offline. There's a free demo as well. Full features, just noise bursts until you register.

Full details and the browser demo: https://nerve-audio.com/en/magnetar/