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 ..
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.
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 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.
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?
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 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 ..
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! :)
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:
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
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.
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 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.
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/
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.
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!!!
:)
> 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!! :)
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?
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 ..)
> 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 ..
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! :)
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/
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
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.
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 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.