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.