I play music by sight (poorly) and can improvise a little bit on guitar, and would love to understand music theory better but so far do not.
Is this a useful device to get a feel for creating music, or is it only really useful if you already understand music theory or improvisation?
Firmware like Obervave, Hortator, X0X, and FMini-1, with their limited scope and greater depth I find to be more useful, at least as part of a bigger workflow.
E.g. it'll tell you how to activate the arpeggiator, as well as what an arpeggio is, what notes comprise each chord, scales, etc, which are all programmed into the firmware.
How long until we get that with a native support for changing firmware?
As in: preload ten firmware versions and switch between them, with persisted state?
but hook your FM1 to your phone and flash from there (the firmware hub)... very portable.
i like m-pyre a lot right now - https://historyofsky.github.io/m-pyre/
Additionally, understanding theory and improvisation is certainly a great thing to know if you're trying to make music, but you can understand a ton of things in the abstract and also be pretty terrible at applying it in the moment.
So if you want to get a device you can throw some hacked firmware on and have some fun, I'd say don't let your lack of theory hold you back.
"Useful" is a really subjective word when it comes to making music in general. Some template groove on a shit keyboard could be the base for a hit song (like Gorillaz' Clint Eastwood) while others don't make stuff unless in front of a modular synth with 100% control of everything.
Any instrument can be fun without knowing music theory, as long as you're willing to trial and error for a bit, until you find what sounds good :)
Many of them work in browser too, which is essential for choosing what to try next!
Some faves:
I feel like the Chinese have made and sold enough music gear on behalf of other manufacturers over time that they can technically make the products, but I don't think they understand the market so they will be flawed and toy-grade for a while until they hire some consultants and carefully study the various portable MIDI gear that has succeeded over time. I'm not sure what the electronic music scene looks like in China but I would suspect most of the people involved still use non-Chinese gear and software.
There's a lot of excellent gear coming out of China. Behringer has their factories there, Donner has a range of recreations (not clones) of various classic Roland analog synths, and also make a wide variety of controllers, pedals, and other gear. Ashun Sound Machines makes the Hydrasynth and a few others, one of the most highly regarded digital synths on the market.
I just got one for $48 on aliexpress.
Connector wise, far superior to DIN midi
Feels like studio setups are personal and individual enough that you can't say it's fair or unfair for someone else to care about specific features. Everything I own, including my own modular synth, has MIDI DIN ports on them, so I too look for that in new gear, but friend of mine too don't use MIDI for anything, obviously he doesn't look for that :)
not the person you're replying to, but -
I would be ok w/ the 1/8" jacks if there weren't TWO STANDARDS to keep up with. madness!
This thing is absolutely worth the $$$ once you install Sloop on it but I regret having bought one only because I'm getting way more mileage out of using a small game pad to drive the iOS port of Dirtywave M8 (and am probably going to buy a hardware unit when they restock). Personally I enjoy the tracker workflow and chopping samples infinitely more than doing the sequencer thing on a tiny screen but I can't argue that this unit is very powerful for how cheap it is.
But yeah the cheapness is an issue. Even older entry-grade gear, while often entirely plastic, is much more robust and with real ports, they often have one of those little plastic rakes that retains your power cable too. A three cent addition I'm sure but one which is great to have.
I already have some groove boxes, what does this one bring to the table? Every groove box is annoying in its own way even the really good ones. I have yet to find something that does it all better than the good old MPC. I need a MIDI event list editor, very very few grooveboxes offer this. Only Emu/Ensoniq, Akai and Yamaha's did. Akai still offers it but I don't think their newer mini-MPC has this.
I think that's actually the built-in speaker?
The FM1 has started a revolution.
It was rare pre-LLMs, post-LLM seems more and more go this way actually. Just few hours I wrote this in a comment about established brands embracing the new user-firmware world:
> [...] Erica Synths (big in both desktop gear and modular synths), Polyend, Akai/MPC, Moog and more. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50482555
My personal guess (and hope I suppose) is that all of them go in this direction cough Elektron cough, which judging by the current wave, doesn't seem impossible.
This is such a cool hardware meme/software/ai dev thing that makes me very happy for the world.
I am just about to start learning. If anyone could drop firmware knowledge aside from Baud Girl (cool af) ... I would appreciate it. I am mostly excited about Obervave, but I will have two FM-1's shortly... what is the best step sequencer firmware at the moment?
I just wish it had proper 909 & 303 emulation
seems theres a few in there that make it more a DAW
I don't know anything about synthesisers, but would I be right in thinking the FM modulation would be done via software on the MCU?
Right now, designing and mass-producing hardware is still a bit specialized, but creating software isn't. They have decided to embrace life as a creative hardware platform.
Where do I get one of these?
This link is a great practical guide, which has you look at waveforms in an audio editor and clone them using FM, one operator at a time. He walks you through making clones of several real life instruments, 6 operators is enough to sound quite good and 8 is even better. FM has a reputation for being computer-y sounding but it doesn't need to be. A lot of that is just baggage from default patches introduced decades ago with that fresh '80s sound, those patches from the DX-7 are still on the newest Yamaha flagship workstations. And as everybody knows the grand majority of sounds you hear in music are barely- or not-tweaked presets.
https://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~pbarfuss/FM_Synthesis_of_Real_I...
Anyway, I found these hands-on demos on the DX1 to be some of the most "aha" moments I've had trying to understand how FM patches are made.
TLDR, an FM "operator" is an oscillator. A carrier is the oscillator you hear, its modulator is an oscillator that wiggles the carrier and brings out different harmonics. You can stack more modulators and you can have multiple carriers going in parallel, the various combinations of operators available in a synth being the different algorithms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YV9vQGqoO5c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0xGyR_lKoM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-boGIxRZ_s
There was also one from Venus Theory about how to get musically useful stuff out of frequency/phase modulation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqc8rZnzTVI
Everything comes at a cost. The entshitification of everything, the total lack of intention.
I’ve developed boutique hardware instruments and sold them to retailers around the world, so this affects me directly.
It removes financial incentives to do research and development in these areas because overnight someone can just duplicate or imitate your work.
And its the height of hypocrisy from artists to call out for copyright protections of music, but then simultaneously support vibe coded software thats been trained on data thats probably stolen.
I get the world is changing fast, but what its taught me is that people are ravenous and are willing to watch entire industries and maybe even society itself collapse if they think they can get a free short-term meal from it. Pretty disheartening
Think this bodes well for the future of Chinese consumer electronics. They have really been punching above their weight. Even the "cheap" guitar pedals are better than what you'd find with American/EU equivalent companies while being 60-80% cheaper.
Just a shame that Chinese workers are too often exploited.
But as long it is cheap and you'll never visit China, then who cares that someone might be exploited there.
You do understand that costs of making something in the West is different than in China? Some companies unfortunately have to compromise on quality to maintain price that is not outrageous when you compare to Chinese.
...the price of made in china device that is just branded with EU/US brand ?
PS: and I mean PLENTY !
I wonder how long this will last.
This also got companies like Behringer an idea that they can just release the hardware and people will create firmware for free. Genius.
edit: that reminds me I actually bought one too, but forgot about it. Still unopened.
Well, of course. They're able to get the stuff they want to run off of the computer, and onto the device. Not everyone hates working in the box, but a lot of people do.
> This also got companies like Behringer an idea that they can just release the hardware and people will create firmware for free. Genius.
Honestly, this is great. Getting viable hardware with annoying shit like buttons and knobs is beyond the reach of a lot of developers, but writing software is not.
Something like this but for VSTs would be killer.
A couple of these exist in guitar pedal form for lv2 (which is a dead format): Mod Audio Dwarf, and pistomp.
Nothing for VST3 that I'm aware of. Maybe the new Akai stuff?
https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/muse-research-receptor
https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/muse-research-receptor-...
You can pick them up, often fully loaded with plugins, for a few hundred dollars. I wrote parts of the system. They were running Linux and fun to hack on.
I currently work in the professional audio industry and know of a few modern efforts underway to produce modern version of this, but I am not convinced there is market for such a device anymore.
I'm sure a lot of professional musicians would probably prefer to use something less fragile than a laptop, something you can rack up, with no pesky desktop OS niggles to worry about during a show. As you know many instruments today are simply dedicated VST runners with a handy physical interface, see Roland's Boutique and Aira synths. I have an MPC One which I love, it can run proprietary VSTs. Maybe such convergences have killed the need for a dedicated box.
I know for a fact new devices like this are on the horizon, but it just might not be the form factor that you are looking for.
It's actually a golden age for the MIDI fan but there's a lot of complaining to be done too about aspects of it. Cheapness and hooking you to a store being two big ones.