Comment by MomsAVoxell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MomsAVoxell | Hacker News Reader

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 ..

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 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.

> 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!! :)

> 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! :)

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