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Once in a while, a machine comes along with such poise and elegance that it creates a whole new level. Something that subverts expectations, refuses to follow convention, and instead opens up the artist within you to explore the unfamiliar. The Solar 50 from Elta Music was one such device. Released in 2019, it bucked the trend of analog rediscovery that clung to the keyboard paradigm and traditional architecture, and instead it borrowed from modular, it found inspiration in the Harmonium and toyed endlessly with its Soviet heritage. They called it the BIG Ambient Machine, and it was a unique melting of many individual analog voices, squeezed through POLYVOX filters and poured into a cartridge-based effector. Mixing was dynamic, control was visceral, and the interface was alarmingly vulnerable to external influence.
The result was a massively cinematic drone machine that was unlike anything you'd ever seen or heard. Solar 50 had 10 voices, each with 5 oscillators, which, you can probably guess, is where the name came from. At Superbooth 2023 in Berlin, Elta Music revealed the Solar 42. It was an interesting evolution of the Solar 50 that made concessions for traditional musicality while cranking up its versatility. It opened doors that took it far beyond drones and soundscapes, while retaining its dynamic interface and the character of unintended adventure. Exactly where the number 42 comes from is less clear, as it now has 6 drone voices with 5 oscillators each, a pair of 1v/Oct VCOs, and numerous LFOs and other generators that don't quite add up, but who’s counting? It's probably a reference to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, which feels very apt for such a machine.
In 2025, the Solar 42f iteration arrived, adding stereo distortion, improving the VCOs, adding sub-oscillators, expanding the filters, and tuning up the touchplates. Now we have the Solar 42n. The "n" version makes some small changes like adding speed switches to the LFOs, adding CV to the right filter and simplified the effector loading. So, on the whole, this is the greatest version yet.
Elta Solar 42n Overview
In essence, the Solar 42n is a number of things. It's a drone machine, it's microtonal, it's polyphonic, analog, semi-modular, and a powerhouse of interactive ambient sound creation. It has 8 voices that can be manipulated and mixed through Solar 42n's labyrinthine architecture, but not all the voices are the same. It's laid out in self-contained panels, which seem odd in terms of traditional synthesis but much more familiar to those who work with modular.
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The story begins with four drone voices (1, 2, 4, and 5), known as "Classic" drones taken directly from the Solar 50. They sit to the right and left of the Effector panel, identical in features and ready to drone. Each classic voice has five oscillators with individual mute buttons, tuning knobs, and modulation on/off buttons. The first two are pitched low, and the remaining three are geared higher. There's no 1 volt per octave tuning or waveform sync; these are oscillators functioning out in the wilderness, and so as you tune them to chords or unisons, they may well drift and do interesting things. This is compounded by the weird-looking photo-sensitive detector. With the Mod button activated the ambient light around the Solar 42n will have an impact on the pitch of the voices. The large Volt knob will transpose all 5 oscillators down, if you turn it left. If you go right, they start to modulate each other for some crude FM synthesis.
One of these voices would be enough to have some exciting drone adventures, but you've got four of them to play with. You already get a sense that this is a machine of epic possibility.
The next two drone voices (3 and 6) are based on DIY noise synthesizers created by Russian artist Papa Srapa. Papa would perform with a bunch of self-made electroacoustic instruments, synths, and modified machines, in innovative and eccentric ways, with a unique blend of noise and shamanism. The perfect basis for a pair of unexpected drone voices placed on either side of the Solar 42n. Each voice consists of four knobs and four switches that control pitch, modulation, and how the two internal Schmidt-Trigger oscillators relate to each other. One oscillator is a low-frequency square wave that operates as a clock and modulator, while the other runs at audio rate for tone generation. It can drone openly and unaffected, or it can throb and pulse through some FM and/or AM modulation. You can also feed in white noise or run it through a Sample & Hold circuit to pull in random pitches. They are odd voices that quickly descend into chaotic sirens, squirts, and streams of beeps as you play and manipulate.
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All six drone voices are primarily controlled via the six Drone Voices buttons to the right of the touch-plate keyboard. But they can also be held open or gated by other modulation sources.
That leaves the two melodic VCOs that find themselves mirrored in the center section. They are triangle core AS3340-based VCOs with four distinct waveforms and two variable ones. There's a sub-oscillator, pulse-width modulation, and an octave switch. An ADSR envelope controls the level over time, and this can be spun into an LFO. There are sync and FM opportunities as well. The important factor is that they are calibrated to 1v/oct, making them musically useful to external controllers and sequencers, and are connected directly to the touch-plate keyboard.
Modulation + Control
Between the synth and the touch-plate is a row of red knobs that offer a front line of modulation options. There are two LFOs, a joystick controller, a five-step sequencer, a preamp for an in-built contact microphone, and a companion envelope follower. The mic can be bypassed by plugging in an external input such as a guitar or other instrument. All of this modulation can be patched into any of the voices in whatever way you choose.
The other big modulator is, of course, the touch-plate keyboard. It may appear at first glance to be a typical musical keyboard, but it's much more than that. For starters, the note of each plate is not static. You can set it to be whatever note or voltage level you wish. Those notes are then normalled to the two VCOs' 1v/Oct inputs, but you can also use the direct output for other purposes. You have two gate outputs, one for the left side and one for the right, that fire every time you touch a plate. There's a pressure output that streams voltage, quantized or otherwise, in response to how much of your flesh is interacting with the plate.
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The keyboard has a digital engine that can perform a wide range of functions. It can be an arpeggiator, a sequencer; it can quantize, produce portamento, and vibrato; and you can store behavioral presets. You can use the touch plate as a single big keyboard or split it into two separate controllers with different behaviors. With all these possibilities, the keyboard is capable of providing a very detailed control surface for the whole of the Solar 42n.
All of the signals from everything that's playing or being played come together in the central mixer panel. It's very simple. You have 10 channels, each with volume and panning knobs for the six drone voices, the two VCOs, the preamp, and the external audio input. This is where you create your mix of sounds that will route into the filters, distortion, and effector.
Above the mixer is a large section of signal processing where everything comes together. First, we have the dual filter based upon the classic Soviet-era Formanta Polivoks filter with lowpass and bandpass options. The resonance is designed not to roll off the low frequencies as the original does, so it retains its aggression even when you crank it up. You can link the two together for regular stereo filtering or separate them into competing peaks of harmonic sculpting. Between them is a stereo distortion knob that sets the wet/dry balance with the distorted signal.
Effects in the Solar 42n
No ambient machine would be without an interesting array of effects; it's the secret sauce that catapults a soundscape into cinematic territory. More than the icing on the cake, the Solar 42n Effector is an integral part of the instrument. The effects are stored on cool little plugin cartridges. Each one has three effects, and you can load one into the left channel and another into the right. There are currently thirteen Effector cartridges covering massive shimmering reverbs, deep modulations, creative delays, vibey shifts and filtering, digital noise, and synth generation. Once an effect is loaded, the cartridge can be removed and replaced with another one to seek out the perfect combination of effects. It's an unexpectedly useful feature and more versatile than you might have thought. There are three CV inputs for modulation and control, a Blend knob to set the effect level, and a master volume control and headphone output, which is where our journey comes to its conclusion.
The Solar 42n Experience
The experience of playing the Solar 42n is part science experiment, part musical puzzler, part grumbling sound wizard, and part cavernous sonic sculpture. It is fiercely microtonal, dangerously obtuse, and laughably overbearing. It's capable of incredible nonsense and yet can pull itself together in a slow, lumbering fashion from fog to focus. It's probably too much, which means you're unlikely to reach the end of it anytime soon.
Solar 42n looks amazing. It's a solid chunk of synthesizer reality that ensures every bit is playable, reachable, and largely free of accidental knob-bumps. It's also available in a number of colors, including pink, blue, black, yellow, and white—how often can you say that about a synth? The ordered layout with the mirrored left/right panels is very soothing and definitely helps you navigate what is a complex collection of parts, although you could also say it's a bit straight-laced. It sometimes feels a little bit too self-contained. While there are plenty of CV patch points, there are few useful audio outputs. Other than the stereo output on the back and the headphone socket on the front, only the two VCOs get dry, unmixed outputs that you can then patch into other things.
On the other hand, it's the nature of Solar 42n as a complete instrument that really makes it shine. While it may look like a modular synth, the layout is just for clarity, not for signal flow or modular shenanigans. Overall, the Sonar 42n is an elegant and sophisticated drone machine that draws deeply from the wells of ambient soundscapes, becoming a unique source of cinematic electronic sound-making.
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