Legioverload: announcing 16 new Legio firmwares
You read that right: we just released 16 NEW firmwares for the Legio. That takes the total number up to 23 total firmwares! If you can’t wait to start exploring, head over to the new Legio page for info on every firmware and even easier firmware swapping.
Today, we’ll have a brief overview of the Legio platform, in case you’re unfamiliar, and take a look at the 16 new firmwares. In the coming weeks, we’ll take a deeper dive into all of the new possibilities, take a look at the new-and-improved (and much, much faster!) firmware swapping process, and more.
What is Legio?
Legio is the smallest member of our platform family. In just 6 HP, you get stereo audio in and out, pitch tracking, and a few parameters. Don’t let its small size fool you: Legio’s firmwares include audio effects like compression, distortion, filters, and granular processors, all in stereo! Then, there are a suite of audio generators, including oscillators and even complete melodic and percussive voices. Legio opens up tons (23, to be exact) of possibilities, and its compact size means that it can fit in even the tiniest of systems.
If you haven’t added a Legio to your Eurorack system yet, now’s a great time. You can buy them from the new Legio page.
A very quick overview of the 16 new firmwares
So, what are these new firmwares, you may ask? We’ve split them up into a few categories:
Oscillators and voices:
AT: A lofi oscillator inspired by Ataraxic Translatron, the first Noise Engineering module.
Gator: A supersaw oscillator with stereo PM inputs.
Plus: A full additive voice with internal envelope and LFOs, as well as stereo PM inputs.
Unda: A full phase-modulation voice designed for chaining into multivoice patches.
Effects:
Bitcrush: A 1v/8va tracking sample rate reducer, bit crusher, and dithering effect.
Megafold: The Noise Engineering wavefolder, in stereo, with extra waveshaping!
Ovis: An experimental granular effect that turns any audio source into a Shepard tone.
Chasma: A dynamics processor similar to Librae, but instead of processing sound in stereo, it applies compression and limiting to the mid and side of a stereo signal.
Hybrid:
Marimba: A physical-modeling voice and processor which emulates real-world resonators and plays them with internal or external exciters.
Reso: A Karplus-Strong voice and resonator designed for emulating strings – you can resonate it with external audio, too.
Percussion:
With this firmware drop, we introduced what we’re calling the Legio drum kit. Each of these firmwares (excluding Bos) features a stereo audio input, so all of the Legio drums can be mixed together without a mixer.
Kick: Analog-inspired kick voice that ducks external audio.
Snare: Physical-modeling snare voice – it plays like a synth and sounds like a real snare!
Cymbal: A granular metallic percussion voice based on samples. Hats, rides, and cymbals galore.
Tom: Lasers, zaps, toms, and mid-range percussion.
Klang: An epic and ridiculous percussion voice based on Basimilus.
Bos: Last but not least, the cowbell voice. This one features stereo PM inputs for even more absurdity.
With so much new to explore, we’ve kept things brief here. If you want to dive deep into any firmware, check out manuals, descriptions, and videos, all linked from the Legio page, or check out the new Legio demo playlist!
100% free, as always
All of these firmwares are completely free to any Legio owners. Just connect them to your computer via USB, navigate to the firmware page, and with a few clicks, you can turn your filter into a cowbell into a compressor into an oscillator into…
Overlays coming soon
If you want the whole collection of all 23 Legio overlays, they’re coming soon! We’re working with new manufacturers to bring you ultra-fancy matte black overlays, so stay tuned.
A bit on how this happened
We have had a long list of things we wanted to release on Legio for a while! For a variety of reasons, this year seemed like a good time to start bringing those on-paper designs into reality. Our weekly meetings (and heck, Slack conversations too!) spawned loads of ideas (you can read more about some of these in the manuals). Not all of them made the cut (a few distortions even Noise Engineering couldn’t love and a very weird concept based on Xenakis’s work, to name a few). There was internal arguing about some that had to be decided by our lovely and helpful group of beta testers. There was more arguing about names. At some point, Stephen tapped out and just said, come back and tell me when we have new names. Markus had to test and re-test approximately 1,000,000 firmwares. Patrick had to whip up 16 new demo videos in the midst of travelling to EMIXX West and KnobCon and packing for a cross-country move. Kris came in at the end and miraculously didn’t find her normal show-stopping bug.
But despite all of it, mostly we just had a ton of fun making things, being inspired by different things, being constrained by the platform and making cool things, and trying out all the ideas we’ve had on the list, some since we launched Virt Iter Legio in 2020.
We hope you enjoy this epic firmware launch, and we can’t wait to show you all of the other things we’ve been working on.
