My partner has been playing with one and its truly incredible, the sequencer interfaces and enhancements make it go from a toy to an incredibly powerful machine. The felucca project has a web interface and you can try out the software on its own without the hardware: https://hugelton.github.io/Felucca/webapp/try/
This has opened the flood gates for great new stuff to be written for it, and oh what a ride it has been these past few weeks! Simply the hottest toy in music-tech, bar none!
I did some bits with gen-1 logue-sdk, the NTS-1 could have been a platform like the OP but the processor is severely underpowered for the price in today's standard and discontinued shortly after.
Oh, nice .. yeah the NTS-1 was a bit of a victim of its Bill of Materials, in my opinion - a lesson learned by the Monome and Zynthian communities, meanwhile.
There sure is, and folks are doing some crazy things with it ..
For example: the Bent[1] and Turbo[2] synths from Sinevibes[3] are incredible.
A perfect example of how the platform was embraced by user-developers and pushed into extremely creative and inspiring territory .. surely other manufacturers will start to take note, and maybe someone, some day, will start shipping their instruments with compilers-onboard, to .. you know .. make it easier for kids to keep the bending going on ..
Disclaimer: I have worked in the music technology business for decades, building toys like this - my opinion is formulated in the fire pits of NAMM and Frankfurt Musik Messe and Superbooth.
The M-VAVE is the hottest music technology device on the market today, with few exceptions.
It is CHEAP! $60!
It is VERSATILE: new firmwares are released almost every week now.
It is HACKABLE: yes kids, music technology should always be hackable. Custom firmwares are one thing: a device which allows musicians to extend their horizons is another thing, entirely. Big Music Tech: PAY ATTENTION.
(Korg: you get a pass. Eurorack hackers: you get passes. Everyone else: FAIL!)
I am sitting in a room full of synths right now, and the only thing I really want to jam with is the N-VAVE FM1, which is now not just an FM synth but a jack of all trades.
But, did you know that this is just the tip of the iceberg for hacking music toys? Almost everything, from the Yamaha DX7 to the Synthstrom Deluge is getting hacked - in great, positive, delightful ways!
There is no better time to get into music technology if you're looking to find something fun and intriguing to hack on. It is so rewarding to crack open the box on a (formerly) locked down DSP cash-cow from some German entity or two, and find out ways to do even more, crazier things with it.
Your cocktail noise/bloop machine has a Motorola 56K DSP in it? There's an emulator for that: https://theusualsuspects.io
It is so, so fun to watch the M-VAVE revolution kicking off. The music technology business has had this level of whimsy in its sights for decades, a few have crashed and burned along the way but now its really happening: the kids are bending things in truly great ways.
Whats next, hackers? Teenage Engineering's OP1 gets a badly needed retrofit, perhaps .. Access Virus C synths get a new SYSEX update with badass features .. Yamaha's A-samplers get faster disk I/O, somehow .. Korgs machines get JUCE'd??!?!!?
And, it just has to be said .. For everything else, there's monome. And Zynthian. Leading the pack for innovative music technology that has some serious weight in the future-proofing department.
Music Tech Doesn't Want Your Locked-In Firmware, Manufacturers! Give us the SDK's already, why don't, ya .. standardly!!!
I always liked how Korg did stuff. Yamaha were always "we do not distribute spare parts or service manuals, do not even ask, they are only for authorised service centres, we'll take you to court if you try to acquire them, we will take anyone distributing them online to court". Roland were more like "You can order spare parts if you set up an account, some guy in Germany might know, we don't give out service manuals to anyone except authorised service centres, you might find some somewhere, I don't know"
And then Korg basically said (when approached, years ago) "we only supply spares and service manuals to authorised service centres, do not even attempt to look for service information online, and especially do not go looking in ftp.korg.com/pub/service/dealeronly/"...
Hehe, yeah, in spite of the cross-pollination between Yamaha and Korg, the Korg engineers seem to have maintained their vitality and whimsy for decades, now.
Just the fact that they were the first, of all manufacturers, to release a professional-grade keyboard which used a raspberry Pi as its engine, is enough to indicate they are, actually, really funny hackers.
They made a freakin' acoustic synthesizer, for FNORDS sake!!! A synthesizer, using physical hardware components, omfg its the coolest thing ever .. (https://www.korg.com/de/products/dj/phase8/)
One of my prized possessions is a Korg okurumi (linen swaddling cloth) which they were giving out as 'dust covers' during a Superbooth show some years back .. it is categorically the best towel in the house, and is my HHGTTG towel, indeed, always there, always ready, always KORG ..
You seem to know what you’re talking about, do you know if the mvave guitar pedals can be hacked. They have a massive range of products, I want to know if the new ai decompiling agents can be used to clone a reverb pedal or delay pedal or effects of any sort. Like could I in theory port a hologram microcosm into one of the mvave effects pedals?
Asking as a novice, how come this is such a big deal compared to just vibe coding something for an stm32 and hooking up a midi keyboard? Is it the professional enclosure + screen + hackability combo or something extra?
I spent a number of hours building a minidexed from a RPi Zero 2 and parts I already had on hand, and it still doesn't have a proper case. Add 40 buttons, 8 pots and a screen, that's an easy $20-40 worth of parts. Then there's lithium battery and charging curcuits.
Or just buy an FM-1 for $60, most musicians are not hardware hackers.
For the hardware hackers there are hundreds if not thousands of open-source projects. Infinite Digits Zeptocore immediately comes to my mind.
I grabbed one of these since I didn't have a hardware FM synth. While playing around with a web-based patch editor and seeing how well synths can run in a web, I started using AI to build out my own synths, and it's been a lot of fun. I've done FM, granular, samplers, 303 and 808 clones, and a bunch of others. So yeah, if you don't care about the experience of having a bespoke device, you could probably one-shot something much more sophisticated than this.
Yes, musical instruments represent the refinement of technology towards a very specific purpose: the creation of music.
The nature and form of the instrument directs the talents of the musician towards their desired aesthetic. In many ways, the interface informs and sculpts the final product - so instruments which are malleable (software-upgradeable) while providing a canonical haptic experience (hardware control surface) are very appealing to the modern artist.
There is a lot of innovation in the music technology world, vis a vis turning technology into an instrument of sound - but there is also a lot of stagnation, too. Whether its the ancient art of menu-diving as a performance method, or indeed if its the sudden appearance of cocktail devices with whimsy and creativity encoded in the interface, music technology offers a big, wide and often very woolly world in which to apply creative juices.
The M-VAVE is fantastics because it's cheap, it has a somewhat decent user interface layout, haptically, and now .. it is getting serious hacker attention as a boutique/unique thing to play with. Musicians - especially of the technology-aligned variety - absolutely love to one-up each other and excel in distinguishing themselves from standards - of course, musicians also love standards too - the field offers a very broad spectrum of tastes.
Vibe-coding something for the STM32 is indeed a fun thing to do from a music technology perspective - but having it in a fancy case with a battery management PMU, a decent screen with whimsy (and as little menu-diving as possible), and .. interesting sound .. is very, very appealing.
The issue is, music-technology manufacturers often take the shortest possible route to getting their interfaces implemented. Menu-diving is the scourge of music technology - at least until, that is, someone finds a way to incorporate the washing-machine method into a really kickass performance. Think Kraftwerks' reference to the Operator With Their Pocket Calculator, the mundane yet fashionable laptop-on-stage DaDa faction, and compare it to the real rock and roll of guitar and 'tradititional' instruments. The M-VAVE is an expression of the desire of music technology to not only be great (cheap!) but also full of unexplored potential. It is that unexplored potential which motivates the musician, after all ..
(EDIT: there are plenty of examples of music-hacker toys which fulfill your STM32 postulate: the monome, the Zynthian, the insanely great and fertile field of Eurorack modules, many of which did indeed first start off as some hacky STM32 project .. but there are plenty of STM32's which have found their way into a fancy, somewhat expensive case, too .. so seeing M-VAVE pitch into that world is exciting. I literally cannot wait to see what the M-VAVE will have to offer next week ..)
I was under the impression that the M-VAVE firmwares are closed-source but have been reverse-engineered, as has happened with many other popular music machines. But I know some manufacturers distribute encrypted firmware files, mainly to thwart counterfeiters. But a side effect is it makes it harder to decompile/hack/improve.
Actually the M-VAVE hardware platform is supported by a pretty accessible devKit hardware device, which seems to be quite available with enough tooling onboard to throw at an LLM to decompile/recompile things - and .. in addition .. the right mix of ingredients to form the perfect storm seem to have been applied, in that M-VAVE used the same basic hardware designs for a variety of different, but similarly-aligned products, making it even more attractive to the decomp/recomp style hacking approach.
Meanwhile, music-tech hackers are cracking open some serious nuts. From The Usual Suspects building a perfectly working Motorola 56K DSP emulator, capable of booting many German firmwares and more besides, to the one guy I saw recently who decided to just go ahead and build himself a working (minus effects) emulation of Yamaha's FS1R FM/Formant synthesizer, things are getting positively NUTS in the music-tech world ..
I honestly think there is more bleeding-edge stuff going on in music-tech than in the retro-computing scene (which I also pay a lot of attention to) .. and that is really saying something because the retro-computing guys have been positively loopy for decades now, as well ..
> Give us the SDK's already, why don't, ya .. standardly!!!
I think the trend is there, the other day I was surprised that Polyend Endless, the ~$300 prompt-your-pedal thing actually has a minimal SDK on Github too.
Hey! Just wanted to say that if you aren’t blogging about this stuff you should be. Your writing style is fun and you’re clearly knowledgeable. Would totally read it.
Thanks for the positive feedback! I've had my ups and downs with blogs and so on over the years .. my writing on this subject goes back to the RECORDING magazine days .. I have had the idea of 'resurrecting my blogging' in the TODO list for some time, I just haven't really found the motivation to truly commit to doing it.
But I appreciate the feedback, and I do enjoy the banter that my blathering attracts, sometimes, right here on HN .. so, see you at the next music-technology article! :)
ya plus1 id read the crap outta that. your post earlier pushed me over the ehhh edge to ordering the fm-1. way moreso than the deluge of "music creation youtubers" who all made a video about it like this week.
This really feels like full circle for me. Back around 2012, I started "music synthesizer for Android" and put an app on the Play Store. This was a 20% project for me – I was on Google Fonts at the time, but I really wanted to play with Android. I decided to emulate DX7 because I had really wanted one as a teen (I did have a CX5M, so I was familiar with FM synthesis).
I set myself the goal of putting a DX7 in the hands of a million people. My little app only got a fraction of that, but now that the engine is in Dexed and now the M-VAVE, it seems like that might well happen.
I wonder if they'd send me one. But for $60 I can just get one :)
For context, this is a $65-$80 synthesizer that's been pretty popular for its cheap price tag, and there have been a bunch of third party firmwares being released to make it even more friendly and feature-packed than it already is out of the box. There's quite a bit of discussion in the subreddit:
Myself and a couple friends bought this device a few weeks ago and with the firmware being released, its an amazing device.
I love the idea of cheaper Chinese music hardware with the ability for open source firmware and apps to be loaded into them. I hope the success of this sees a sampler from M-Wave - I'd love a Chinese 404 or MPC...
M-VAVE should pay attention and make an updated FM1-style machine that allows firmware switching from USB storage - the current method is via MIDI Sysex only (USB MIDI class device) - but if they do an upgrade to this hardware, it could be quite possible to just switch firmwares dynamically this way.
And, in so doing, this little Chinese company will snatch the revolutionary glory from a lot of incumbents who have very specifically attempted to not do this kind of music technology instrument for decades. (I'm looking at you, Yamaha, who have had prototypes of this sort of things on the bench for decades but always decided 'not to destroy the existing player keyboard market', instead!)
I am so ready for the world where a $60 device not only provides amazing real-instrumentation haptic experience, but also competes solidly with the iOS-music-making app+controller segment, the laptop-on-stage-plugin-host thing, and all the other rigid directions the music tech world has been enforcing on us ..
I just got one of these, the ecosystem is so exciting right now. I just loaded the sloop firmware on it (super painless webusb) and it's crazy. From another DX7 machine to a simple little groove box with samples and sequences and a really quite lovely UX. So fun
I know this will not be a popular take, but surely I am not the only one who is super tired of endless control surfaces for the same FM and Karplus-Strong algos.
I'm a weirdo, but I love the sound of acoustic and/or sampled instruments - especially drums - over the metallic plonks that supposedly sound like "flute" any day of the week.
Don't get me wrong: the M-VAVE is looking like the Flipper Zero of music hacking, and the price is a steal. But at the end of the day, these sounds only really work for certain genres of music and even then there's only so many wavetable shapes before the same-ness has to set in.
i havent played with the unofficial firmwares yet but i thought i saw that some of them have added sampling capabilities... wouldnt that make this exactly the kind of thing youd want? (assuming reasonable sample rates durations are possible on this hardware)
On a small device like the M-VAVE, "sampling" usually means that you take (or record) an audio sample and perhaps if you're lucky, algorithmically pitch it up/down so that you can play it on the keyboard.
There's nothing wrong/bad about that, but when I talk about sampling, I'm talking about usually large libraries of professionally captured sounds. These are often the product of teams of specialists who rent a professional studio and use an array of high-end mics to capture every sound an instrument makes in an intimidating number of ways.
Indeed, they often capture multiple takes of each sound so that if you play them quickly, they don't sound like they are repeating.
Really what I'm getting at is the difference between recording a high-end snare or cymbal at Abbey Road with a fancy mic and putting white noise through an ADSR and a voltage controlled filter. Wildly different strokes for different folks.
I don't get the hype. A processor 10'000x less powerful than a 2021 M1 iPad, sound quality of late 90s to early 2000s VA. It's cheap and sounds the part.
You CAN get an STM32 to sound beautiful and fun (shout out MI Braids), but in 2026 that's available in VCV Rack for free.
But, add a keyboard and a display and you're spending the same amount for a worse form-factor. Form-factor is a big part of a musical instrument. People love these little music boxes; see Teenage Engineering gear, which is tiny, quite limited, and crazy expensive. But, people love tinkering with it.
Then again, the keyboard on this thing is ass. They have a bigger version with a proper keyboard (though it probably also sucks), I don't know if folks have hacked that one of if it is hackable in the same way. I would kind of assume it is, though.
Yeah I'm a bit puzzled myself. I can see why developers would be interested, but not so much musicians. As someone who owns a decent amount of hardware synths and Eurorack I know this thing would be gathering dust after a day or two.
I bought one a few months ago as a cheap DX7 clone. It's great just as that. So then all these new firmwares coming out have just been incredible. It's like a poor man's OP1 now.
The interesting question is how much of the fizz from these efforts will disappear if SOTA models start moving away from moral gray areas or because of security concerns the guardrails disable this type of work.
Yeah, it's a real weird time for Elektron.
Their whole business model is that they would sell you the same box multiple times if you wanted both synth and samples.
But now people are just adding this stuff to Digitakt mk1.
Personally, I am hesitant to start messing with firmware- I have just gotten to where I'm productive on my setup (octatrack for samples and mixing, DT keys and hydrasynth for sounds, squarp pyramid for programming).
I'm hoping to lock that setup for a year or more and just do electronic music on that system, as I find it productive... I am not sure that adding features would be helpful.
But it's neat to know that I might have a bunch of options when I move out of my self-imposed embargo on system changes next year and I think it's rad folks are enjoying that change to the ecosystem. I'm generally very opposed to LLMs and had happily retired from programming about the time the first bit of that hit, but if folks are successful in making software for hardware that functions well, then that's rad.
This synth is fucking crazy, synths have never approached this price point before ever. You have european firms like teenage engineering making similar products for 1500+ euro. hoping for more like it
For those that haven't been following along, a TON of custom firmwares have shown up for the M-VAVE FM-1, a roughly ~$70 synth.
BaudGirl's VA is probably the biggest right now: https://baudgirl.com/work/FM-1+VA
But there's also https://github.com/hugelton/Felucca, https://github.com/charlesvestal/fm1-x0x, https://www.groove-os.com, https://isod89.github.io/sloop-fm1/webapp/installer/, and https://github.com/charlesvestal/fm1-fomni
AFAIK, all of them are vibecoded, but that doesn't mean they're not super fun.
Edit: Someone made a good firmware list: https://fm1-editor.com/firmware/
My partner has been playing with one and its truly incredible, the sequencer interfaces and enhancements make it go from a toy to an incredibly powerful machine. The felucca project has a web interface and you can try out the software on its own without the hardware: https://hugelton.github.io/Felucca/webapp/try/
They are SO FUN, seriously. Best $180 I spent (because I bought THREE M-VAVE's!!)! ..
But, it also has to be pointed out to the HN hoipolloi: these firmwares run in web-based emulators too!!!!
So you don't have to blow $60 to join this music tech revolution ..
I wonder what specifically allowed this. Is it some new LLM innovation that can do reverse engineering now?
M-Vave didn't release any source code.
There is a publicly available Devkit[1] for the processor used by M-VAVE in all of their products:
https://doc.zh-jieli.com/AC79/zh-cn/release_v1.0.3/board_des...
.. and .. as all of their products are extremely good value for money .. I dare say some budding hacker saw an opportunity and went with it:
https://github.com/aroum/fm1-custom-fw
This has opened the flood gates for great new stuff to be written for it, and oh what a ride it has been these past few weeks! Simply the hottest toy in music-tech, bar none!
There's a devkit for all of Korg's stuff too.
I did some bits with gen-1 logue-sdk, the NTS-1 could have been a platform like the OP but the processor is severely underpowered for the price in today's standard and discontinued shortly after.
Oh, nice .. yeah the NTS-1 was a bit of a victim of its Bill of Materials, in my opinion - a lesson learned by the Monome and Zynthian communities, meanwhile.
There sure is, and folks are doing some crazy things with it ..
For example: the Bent[1] and Turbo[2] synths from Sinevibes[3] are incredible.
A perfect example of how the platform was embraced by user-developers and pushed into extremely creative and inspiring territory .. surely other manufacturers will start to take note, and maybe someone, some day, will start shipping their instruments with compilers-onboard, to .. you know .. make it easier for kids to keep the bending going on ..
[1] - https://www.sinevibes.com/korgbent/
[2] - https://www.sinevibes.com/korgturbo/
[3] - https://www.sinevibes.com/korg/
Disclaimer: I have worked in the music technology business for decades, building toys like this - my opinion is formulated in the fire pits of NAMM and Frankfurt Musik Messe and Superbooth.
The M-VAVE is the hottest music technology device on the market today, with few exceptions.
It is CHEAP! $60!
It is VERSATILE: new firmwares are released almost every week now.
It is HACKABLE: yes kids, music technology should always be hackable. Custom firmwares are one thing: a device which allows musicians to extend their horizons is another thing, entirely. Big Music Tech: PAY ATTENTION.
(Korg: you get a pass. Eurorack hackers: you get passes. Everyone else: FAIL!)
I am sitting in a room full of synths right now, and the only thing I really want to jam with is the N-VAVE FM1, which is now not just an FM synth but a jack of all trades.
But, did you know that this is just the tip of the iceberg for hacking music toys? Almost everything, from the Yamaha DX7 to the Synthstrom Deluge is getting hacked - in great, positive, delightful ways!
There is no better time to get into music technology if you're looking to find something fun and intriguing to hack on. It is so rewarding to crack open the box on a (formerly) locked down DSP cash-cow from some German entity or two, and find out ways to do even more, crazier things with it.
Your cocktail noise/bloop machine has a Motorola 56K DSP in it? There's an emulator for that: https://theusualsuspects.io
It is so, so fun to watch the M-VAVE revolution kicking off. The music technology business has had this level of whimsy in its sights for decades, a few have crashed and burned along the way but now its really happening: the kids are bending things in truly great ways.
Whats next, hackers? Teenage Engineering's OP1 gets a badly needed retrofit, perhaps .. Access Virus C synths get a new SYSEX update with badass features .. Yamaha's A-samplers get faster disk I/O, somehow .. Korgs machines get JUCE'd??!?!!?
And, it just has to be said .. For everything else, there's monome. And Zynthian. Leading the pack for innovative music technology that has some serious weight in the future-proofing department.
Music Tech Doesn't Want Your Locked-In Firmware, Manufacturers! Give us the SDK's already, why don't, ya .. standardly!!!
:)
> Korg: you get a pass.
I always liked how Korg did stuff. Yamaha were always "we do not distribute spare parts or service manuals, do not even ask, they are only for authorised service centres, we'll take you to court if you try to acquire them, we will take anyone distributing them online to court". Roland were more like "You can order spare parts if you set up an account, some guy in Germany might know, we don't give out service manuals to anyone except authorised service centres, you might find some somewhere, I don't know"
And then Korg basically said (when approached, years ago) "we only supply spares and service manuals to authorised service centres, do not even attempt to look for service information online, and especially do not go looking in ftp.korg.com/pub/service/dealeronly/"...
Hehe, yeah, in spite of the cross-pollination between Yamaha and Korg, the Korg engineers seem to have maintained their vitality and whimsy for decades, now.
Just the fact that they were the first, of all manufacturers, to release a professional-grade keyboard which used a raspberry Pi as its engine, is enough to indicate they are, actually, really funny hackers.
They made a freakin' acoustic synthesizer, for FNORDS sake!!! A synthesizer, using physical hardware components, omfg its the coolest thing ever .. (https://www.korg.com/de/products/dj/phase8/)
One of my prized possessions is a Korg okurumi (linen swaddling cloth) which they were giving out as 'dust covers' during a Superbooth show some years back .. it is categorically the best towel in the house, and is my HHGTTG towel, indeed, always there, always ready, always KORG ..
You seem to know what you’re talking about, do you know if the mvave guitar pedals can be hacked. They have a massive range of products, I want to know if the new ai decompiling agents can be used to clone a reverb pedal or delay pedal or effects of any sort. Like could I in theory port a hologram microcosm into one of the mvave effects pedals?
Asking as a novice, how come this is such a big deal compared to just vibe coding something for an stm32 and hooking up a midi keyboard? Is it the professional enclosure + screen + hackability combo or something extra?
I spent a number of hours building a minidexed from a RPi Zero 2 and parts I already had on hand, and it still doesn't have a proper case. Add 40 buttons, 8 pots and a screen, that's an easy $20-40 worth of parts. Then there's lithium battery and charging curcuits.
Or just buy an FM-1 for $60, most musicians are not hardware hackers.
For the hardware hackers there are hundreds if not thousands of open-source projects. Infinite Digits Zeptocore immediately comes to my mind.
I grabbed one of these since I didn't have a hardware FM synth. While playing around with a web-based patch editor and seeing how well synths can run in a web, I started using AI to build out my own synths, and it's been a lot of fun. I've done FM, granular, samplers, 303 and 808 clones, and a bunch of others. So yeah, if you don't care about the experience of having a bespoke device, you could probably one-shot something much more sophisticated than this.
> 303 and 808 clones
It doesn't have nearly enough power for proper circuit modeling. You might as well use samples.
Define proper circuit modeling, please.
SPICE.
SPICE is a good first step. Raw metal code, the next best thing. Go ahead, prove me wrong.
Yes, musical instruments represent the refinement of technology towards a very specific purpose: the creation of music.
The nature and form of the instrument directs the talents of the musician towards their desired aesthetic. In many ways, the interface informs and sculpts the final product - so instruments which are malleable (software-upgradeable) while providing a canonical haptic experience (hardware control surface) are very appealing to the modern artist.
There is a lot of innovation in the music technology world, vis a vis turning technology into an instrument of sound - but there is also a lot of stagnation, too. Whether its the ancient art of menu-diving as a performance method, or indeed if its the sudden appearance of cocktail devices with whimsy and creativity encoded in the interface, music technology offers a big, wide and often very woolly world in which to apply creative juices.
The M-VAVE is fantastics because it's cheap, it has a somewhat decent user interface layout, haptically, and now .. it is getting serious hacker attention as a boutique/unique thing to play with. Musicians - especially of the technology-aligned variety - absolutely love to one-up each other and excel in distinguishing themselves from standards - of course, musicians also love standards too - the field offers a very broad spectrum of tastes.
Vibe-coding something for the STM32 is indeed a fun thing to do from a music technology perspective - but having it in a fancy case with a battery management PMU, a decent screen with whimsy (and as little menu-diving as possible), and .. interesting sound .. is very, very appealing.
The issue is, music-technology manufacturers often take the shortest possible route to getting their interfaces implemented. Menu-diving is the scourge of music technology - at least until, that is, someone finds a way to incorporate the washing-machine method into a really kickass performance. Think Kraftwerks' reference to the Operator With Their Pocket Calculator, the mundane yet fashionable laptop-on-stage DaDa faction, and compare it to the real rock and roll of guitar and 'tradititional' instruments. The M-VAVE is an expression of the desire of music technology to not only be great (cheap!) but also full of unexplored potential. It is that unexplored potential which motivates the musician, after all ..
(EDIT: there are plenty of examples of music-hacker toys which fulfill your STM32 postulate: the monome, the Zynthian, the insanely great and fertile field of Eurorack modules, many of which did indeed first start off as some hacky STM32 project .. but there are plenty of STM32's which have found their way into a fancy, somewhat expensive case, too .. so seeing M-VAVE pitch into that world is exciting. I literally cannot wait to see what the M-VAVE will have to offer next week ..)
> It is HACKABLE
> Everyone else: FAIL!
I was under the impression that the M-VAVE firmwares are closed-source but have been reverse-engineered, as has happened with many other popular music machines. But I know some manufacturers distribute encrypted firmware files, mainly to thwart counterfeiters. But a side effect is it makes it harder to decompile/hack/improve.
Actually the M-VAVE hardware platform is supported by a pretty accessible devKit hardware device, which seems to be quite available with enough tooling onboard to throw at an LLM to decompile/recompile things - and .. in addition .. the right mix of ingredients to form the perfect storm seem to have been applied, in that M-VAVE used the same basic hardware designs for a variety of different, but similarly-aligned products, making it even more attractive to the decomp/recomp style hacking approach.
Meanwhile, music-tech hackers are cracking open some serious nuts. From The Usual Suspects building a perfectly working Motorola 56K DSP emulator, capable of booting many German firmwares and more besides, to the one guy I saw recently who decided to just go ahead and build himself a working (minus effects) emulation of Yamaha's FS1R FM/Formant synthesizer, things are getting positively NUTS in the music-tech world ..
I honestly think there is more bleeding-edge stuff going on in music-tech than in the retro-computing scene (which I also pay a lot of attention to) .. and that is really saying something because the retro-computing guys have been positively loopy for decades now, as well ..
> Give us the SDK's already, why don't, ya .. standardly!!!
I think the trend is there, the other day I was surprised that Polyend Endless, the ~$300 prompt-your-pedal thing actually has a minimal SDK on Github too.
Yes for sure, things are looking up for music hackers. Whether manufacturers like it or not!! :)
Now all we need is for someone to use AI to make the AKAI Rhythm Wolf useful
Hey! Just wanted to say that if you aren’t blogging about this stuff you should be. Your writing style is fun and you’re clearly knowledgeable. Would totally read it.
Thanks for the positive feedback! I've had my ups and downs with blogs and so on over the years .. my writing on this subject goes back to the RECORDING magazine days .. I have had the idea of 'resurrecting my blogging' in the TODO list for some time, I just haven't really found the motivation to truly commit to doing it.
But I appreciate the feedback, and I do enjoy the banter that my blathering attracts, sometimes, right here on HN .. so, see you at the next music-technology article! :)
ya plus1 id read the crap outta that. your post earlier pushed me over the ehhh edge to ordering the fm-1. way moreso than the deluge of "music creation youtubers" who all made a video about it like this week.
Well thats a nice outcome .. I hope you’ll enjoy the heck out of the thing and have some great jams. It’s a beautiful thing.
This really feels like full circle for me. Back around 2012, I started "music synthesizer for Android" and put an app on the Play Store. This was a 20% project for me – I was on Google Fonts at the time, but I really wanted to play with Android. I decided to emulate DX7 because I had really wanted one as a teen (I did have a CX5M, so I was familiar with FM synthesis).
I set myself the goal of putting a DX7 in the hands of a million people. My little app only got a fraction of that, but now that the engine is in Dexed and now the M-VAVE, it seems like that might well happen.
I wonder if they'd send me one. But for $60 I can just get one :)
Thank you for your efforts!
For context, this is a $65-$80 synthesizer that's been pretty popular for its cheap price tag, and there have been a bunch of third party firmwares being released to make it even more friendly and feature-packed than it already is out of the box. There's quite a bit of discussion in the subreddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MVaveFM1/
Myself and a couple friends bought this device a few weeks ago and with the firmware being released, its an amazing device.
I love the idea of cheaper Chinese music hardware with the ability for open source firmware and apps to be loaded into them. I hope the success of this sees a sampler from M-Wave - I'd love a Chinese 404 or MPC...
M-VAVE should pay attention and make an updated FM1-style machine that allows firmware switching from USB storage - the current method is via MIDI Sysex only (USB MIDI class device) - but if they do an upgrade to this hardware, it could be quite possible to just switch firmwares dynamically this way.
And, in so doing, this little Chinese company will snatch the revolutionary glory from a lot of incumbents who have very specifically attempted to not do this kind of music technology instrument for decades. (I'm looking at you, Yamaha, who have had prototypes of this sort of things on the bench for decades but always decided 'not to destroy the existing player keyboard market', instead!)
I am so ready for the world where a $60 device not only provides amazing real-instrumentation haptic experience, but also competes solidly with the iOS-music-making app+controller segment, the laptop-on-stage-plugin-host thing, and all the other rigid directions the music tech world has been enforcing on us ..
I just got one of these, the ecosystem is so exciting right now. I just loaded the sloop firmware on it (super painless webusb) and it's crazy. From another DX7 machine to a simple little groove box with samples and sequences and a really quite lovely UX. So fun
I know this will not be a popular take, but surely I am not the only one who is super tired of endless control surfaces for the same FM and Karplus-Strong algos.
I'm a weirdo, but I love the sound of acoustic and/or sampled instruments - especially drums - over the metallic plonks that supposedly sound like "flute" any day of the week.
Don't get me wrong: the M-VAVE is looking like the Flipper Zero of music hacking, and the price is a steal. But at the end of the day, these sounds only really work for certain genres of music and even then there's only so many wavetable shapes before the same-ness has to set in.
i havent played with the unofficial firmwares yet but i thought i saw that some of them have added sampling capabilities... wouldnt that make this exactly the kind of thing youd want? (assuming reasonable sample rates durations are possible on this hardware)
Sort of, but mostly not really...
On a small device like the M-VAVE, "sampling" usually means that you take (or record) an audio sample and perhaps if you're lucky, algorithmically pitch it up/down so that you can play it on the keyboard.
There's nothing wrong/bad about that, but when I talk about sampling, I'm talking about usually large libraries of professionally captured sounds. These are often the product of teams of specialists who rent a professional studio and use an array of high-end mics to capture every sound an instrument makes in an intimidating number of ways.
Indeed, they often capture multiple takes of each sound so that if you play them quickly, they don't sound like they are repeating.
Really what I'm getting at is the difference between recording a high-end snare or cymbal at Abbey Road with a fancy mic and putting white noise through an ADSR and a voltage controlled filter. Wildly different strokes for different folks.
I don't get the hype. A processor 10'000x less powerful than a 2021 M1 iPad, sound quality of late 90s to early 2000s VA. It's cheap and sounds the part.
You CAN get an STM32 to sound beautiful and fun (shout out MI Braids), but in 2026 that's available in VCV Rack for free.
But, add a keyboard and a display and you're spending the same amount for a worse form-factor. Form-factor is a big part of a musical instrument. People love these little music boxes; see Teenage Engineering gear, which is tiny, quite limited, and crazy expensive. But, people love tinkering with it.
Then again, the keyboard on this thing is ass. They have a bigger version with a proper keyboard (though it probably also sucks), I don't know if folks have hacked that one of if it is hackable in the same way. I would kind of assume it is, though.
Yeah I'm a bit puzzled myself. I can see why developers would be interested, but not so much musicians. As someone who owns a decent amount of hardware synths and Eurorack I know this thing would be gathering dust after a day or two.
I bought one a few months ago as a cheap DX7 clone. It's great just as that. So then all these new firmwares coming out have just been incredible. It's like a poor man's OP1 now.
I started collecting all the links on an “awesome list” since this exploded https://github.com/cicloid/awesome-fm-1
The interesting question is how much of the fizz from these efforts will disappear if SOTA models start moving away from moral gray areas or because of security concerns the guardrails disable this type of work.
Every firmware on the planet is under attack right now.
Finally all these devices with great hardware and less-than-perfect software can have their wrongs put right.
Yeah, it's a real weird time for Elektron. Their whole business model is that they would sell you the same box multiple times if you wanted both synth and samples. But now people are just adding this stuff to Digitakt mk1.
Yeah, it's been strange to watch.
Personally, I am hesitant to start messing with firmware- I have just gotten to where I'm productive on my setup (octatrack for samples and mixing, DT keys and hydrasynth for sounds, squarp pyramid for programming).
I'm hoping to lock that setup for a year or more and just do electronic music on that system, as I find it productive... I am not sure that adding features would be helpful.
But it's neat to know that I might have a bunch of options when I move out of my self-imposed embargo on system changes next year and I think it's rad folks are enjoying that change to the ecosystem. I'm generally very opposed to LLMs and had happily retired from programming about the time the first bit of that hit, but if folks are successful in making software for hardware that functions well, then that's rad.
yeah, this escalated quickly.
i hope to see fm-1.5 with sd card soon to make it sampler. or is it time for hardware mod?..
This synth is fucking crazy, synths have never approached this price point before ever. You have european firms like teenage engineering making similar products for 1500+ euro. hoping for more like it