Neutral Labs Built a Synth Around Malfunction. Now You Can Play It In Tune.

Scrooge was never supposed to behave. Neutral Labs, the German maker behind the Elmyra 2 hybrid drone synth, built the passive semi-modular as a machine that malfunctions on purpose: a CMOS-based circuit engineered to glitch, stutter and drift rather than track pitch cleanly. That instability is the entire pitch. Firmware 1.3 just handed it a MIDI keyboard.

What does firmware 1.3 actually add?

According to Synth Anatomy, the free update lets owners modulate Scrooge's CHOP parameter via MIDI, which opens up tonal, pitched voice playback instead of the purely glitch and noise textures the synth shipped with. Chromatic pitch is now playable straight from Scrooge's onboard sequencer as well, so the instrument can hold a recognizable note without patching in external control. For a box designed around unpredictability, that is a genuine shift in what it can do on a track.

Does more control undercut the point of a broken instrument?

This is the real tension for anyone who owns one. Scrooge's whole identity is malfunction as design principle, not a flaw waiting to be patched out. Give it chromatic, MIDI-controllable pitch and you hand it a second life as an actual melodic voice, useful in a mix in ways the stock glitch character never was. But nothing in firmware 1.3 removes the passive circuit's instability. The CHOP-to-MIDI mapping adds a tuned mode on top of the broken one; it does not fix the brokenness. Whether that reads as dilution or as Neutral Labs simply giving a niche, uncompromising instrument a wider vocabulary depends on why you bought it in the first place.

Firmware 1.3 does not fix Scrooge's malfunction. It gives it a second, tunable voice on top of it.

Who is this update actually for?

Owners who wanted Scrooge in a chord progression, not just as a texture layer, now have a path there without swapping gear. Purists who bought the passive glitch box specifically because it could not be tamed get to decide whether to touch the new mode at all, since the update does not strip out the original malfunctioning behavior.