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!

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 ..

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 ..)

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 ..

Yes for sure, things are looking up for music hackers. Whether manufacturers like it or not!! :)

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! :)

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.

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.