The Neutron is a dual oscillator subtractive monosynth manufactured by

Behringer Behringer is an audio equipment company founded by the Swiss engineer Uli Behringer on 25 January 1989, in Willich, Germany. Behringer was the 14th largest manufacturer of music products in 2007. Behringer is a worldwide, multinational group ...

. Released in 2018, the Neutron has a fully analogue signal path. It is semi-modular, and is compatible with

Eurorack Eurorack is a modular synthesizer format originally specified in 1995 by Doepfer Musikelektronik. It has since grown in popularity, and as of 2022 has become a dominant hardware modular synthesizer format, with over 15,000 modules available from ...

voltages.

Release

The Neutron was announced in January 2018 and was received well by critics. Priced around £300, a relatively low price point, critics highlighted how the Neutron packs in a lot of features for its cost. The Neutron's original design was seen as a welcome break for some due to Behringer's habit of cloning vintage synthesizers. However, criticism was made of the delay circuit, which bled into the signal path when muted.

Design

The Neutron was designed in the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the European mainland, continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...

by engineers at

Midas Midas (; grc-gre, Μίδας) was the name of a king in Phrygia with whom several myths became associated, as well as two later members of the Phrygian royal house. The most famous King Midas is popularly remembered in Greek mythology for his ...

. It has a red faceplate. It can be used as a desktop unit or taken out its casing to be used as a Eurorack module. The Neutron measures 3U by 80HP in Eurorack measurements. Control over the synthesizer comes with seven buttons and 36 knobs.

Oscillators

The synthesizer has two oscillators based on the classic

Curtis Curtis or Curtiss is a common English given name and surname of Anglo-Norman origin from the Old French ''curteis'' ( Modern French ''courtois'') which derived from the Spanish Cortés (of which Cortez is a variation) and the Portuguese and Ga ...

CEM3340, which powered popular synthesizers such as the

Roland SH-101 The Roland SH-101 is an analog synthesizer manufactured by the Roland Corporation between 1982 and 1986. Though it was something of a commercial failure during the time of its manufacture, it later became a staple of electronic music in the 1990 ...

and Sequential Circuits

Prophet 5 The Prophet-5 is an analog synthesizer manufactured by the American company Sequential. It was designed by Dave Smith and John Bowen in 1977, who used microprocessors, then a new technology, to create the first polyphonic synthesizer with full ...

. Each chip has five blendable

waveform In electronics, acoustics, and related fields, the waveform of a signal is the shape of its graph as a function of time, independent of its time and magnitude scales and of any displacement in time.David Crecraft, David Gorham, ''Electro ...

s: sine,

triangle A triangle is a polygon with three edges and three vertices. It is one of the basic shapes in geometry. A triangle with vertices ''A'', ''B'', and ''C'' is denoted \triangle ABC. In Euclidean geometry, any three points, when non- colline ...

, sawtooth,

square In Euclidean geometry, a square is a regular quadrilateral, which means that it has four equal sides and four equal angles (90- degree angles, π/2 radian angles, or right angles). It can also be defined as a rectangle with two equal-length a ...

and "tone mod", a waveshaping oscillator. There is

oscillator sync Oscillator sync is a feature in some synthesizers with two or more VCOs, DCOs, or "virtual" oscillators. As one oscillator finishes a cycle, it resets the period of another oscillator, forcing the latter to have the same base frequency. This can ...

, PWM and a noise source. A mix knob blends the mixture of both oscillators. External sounds can be run through the signal chain. The oscillator range can be changed using the "range" button. The full range of the oscillators is +/-10 octaves. The Neutron has a paraphonic mode to assign each oscillator to a separate note. There is "poly-chaining" functionality, letting you link multiple units together to play

polyphonically Polyphony ( ) is a type of musical texture consisting of two or more simultaneous lines of independent melody, as opposed to a musical texture with just one voice, monophony, or a texture with one dominant melodic voice accompanied by chords, h ...

Filter

Neutron has a 2-pole multimode 12 dB/octave

filter Filter, filtering or filters may refer to: Science and technology Computing * Filter (higher-order function), in functional programming * Filter (software), a computer program to process a data stream * Filter (video), a software component tha ...

with resonance control. It has

low-pass A low-pass filter is a filter that passes signals with a frequency lower than a selected cutoff frequency and attenuates signals with frequencies higher than the cutoff frequency. The exact frequency response of the filter depends on the filte ...

band-pass A band-pass filter or bandpass filter (BPF) is a device that passes frequencies within a certain range and rejects (attenuates) frequencies outside that range. Description In electronics and signal processing, a filter is usually a two-po ...

and

high-pass A high-pass filter (HPF) is an electronic filter that passes signals with a frequency higher than a certain cutoff frequency and attenuates signals with frequencies lower than the cutoff frequency. The amount of attenuation for each frequency d ...

modes (using the patchbay, other filter shapes can be created). The filter can self-oscillate and has key-tracking. The filter was designed by Keith Moffat, head engineer at Midas.

Modulation

There are several modulation sources on the Neutron, including an LFO, two

envelopes An envelope is a common packaging item, usually made of thin, flat material. It is designed to contain a flat object, such as a letter or card. Traditional envelopes are made from sheets of paper cut to one of three shapes: a rhombus, a sh ...

and

sample and hold In electronics, a sample and hold (also known as sample and follow) circuit is an analog device that samples (captures, takes) the voltage of a continuously varying analog signal and holds (locks, freezes) its value at a constant level for ...

. The LFO is bi-polar and has five blendable waveshapes: sine, triangle, sawtooth, square and ramp (reverse sawtooth). It can reach rates of 10 kHz for audio rate modulation. Neutron's two envelopes are ADSR. The Neutron also has a slew limiter and two attenuators.

Effects

The Neutron has a bucket-brigade delay chip with control over time, mix and feedback. It also has an overdrive section with control over drive, level and tone.

Patchbay

The Neutron's patchbay allows reconfiguration of the original signal path. It has 56 patch points in total, 32 inputs and 24 outputs.

Update

The Neutron was updated in December 2018. The 2.0 firmware added keyboard splits, glide,

pitch bend In electronic music, a pitch wheel, pitch bend or bender is a control on a synthesizer to vary the pitch in a continuously variable manner (portamento). The first synthesizer with a pitch wheel was the Minimoog, in 1970. Alternatively, pitch ben ...

levels and other functions.

Impact

In March 2022, Behringer announced the Proton. Similar to the Neutron, the Proton has the same oscillator section as the Neutron. However, the Proton includes substantially more modules, including two looping ASR envelopes, two LFOs (one more than the Neutron), another filter, a waveshaper and sub-oscillators. The Proton will have 64 patch points, eight more than the Neutron.

References

{{Reflist Synthesizers