Neutral Labs Queen Elmyra - An 8-Voice Drone Synth With Real Tubes and 96 Patch Points
Neutral Labs has unveiled the Queen Elmyra, a desktop drone synthesizer that takes the ideas behind the company's pocket-sized Elmyra 2 and blows them up to a far bigger scale. Where the original Elmyra was a compact, menu-driven box, the Queen spreads everything out across a wide front panel packed with knobs, faders, touchpads and patch points. It is described, with some honesty, as "a not-so-modest drone synthesizer", and it is live on Kickstarter now.
Eight Voices, Up to 24 Oscillators
At its core the Queen Elmyra is an eight-voice instrument, with each voice carrying up to three wavetable oscillators. That adds up to a maximum of 24 oscillators running at once. You can treat the whole thing as one enormous drone machine, or split it into eight independent mono synths - the choice is left to the player.
Because the oscillators are wavetable-based and digital, they stay in tune, and each voice can switch between being a sounding oscillator and acting as a modulation source. There are quantized, microtonal and chord modes on board, plus a sequencer for every voice, so the Queen can move well beyond static drones into rhythmic and melodic territory.
Analogue Tubes and a Hands-On Filter
The signal path is a hybrid one. After the digital voices comes an analogue stereo multimode filter, with separate cutoff and resonance controls per channel. The clever part is that the resonance character is not fixed: you can plug components - diodes or capacitors - straight into the front panel to change how the filter behaves.
There is also a genuine vacuum tube stage providing analogue stereo saturation and distortion, giving the instrument warmth and crunch that would be hard to fake digitally. On top of that sit dozens of stereo digital effects - delay, reverb, chorus, phaser, more filters and distortion - with two effect slots available per voice.
A Panel Built for Patching
Neutral Labs clearly wanted the Queen Elmyra to be played by hand rather than through menus. The front panel carries 69 knobs and faders and 96 patch points, with every parameter open to CV control. The patchbay is Eurorack-compatible, so the synth slots neatly into a modular setup, and individual voice outputs let you treat each voice as its own channel.
Connectivity covers 5-pin MIDI in and thru, clock input and output, a reset input, balanced stereo outputs and a headphone socket. Firmware updates arrive over USB-C with simple drag-and-drop installation, and Neutral Labs has promised the same long support schedule it gave the Elmyra 2.
Built in Germany, Shipping Later This Year
The Queen Elmyra comes in a sturdy bamboo-and-steel case measuring 410 x 265 mm and weighing 3.9 kg, assembled in Germany and supplied with a set of patch cables and multiples. The Kickstarter campaign is already fully funded, with units expected to ship in October 2026. As always with crowdfunding, the usual caveats about timelines and risk apply - but for anyone drawn to long, evolving drones with plenty of room to experiment, the Queen Elmyra looks like one of the more ambitious instruments of the year.
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