If you spend any time around synthesizers r/or watch a lot of synth videos on YouTube, you’ve probably noticed the explosion of custom firmware for hardware synthesizers, samplers, and grooveboxes. What unites almost all of them is that they have been made possible by increasingly sophisticated ambiance coding tools.
These types of custom firmware were extremely rare in the pre-LLM era and required both deep expertise and an incredible investment of time. It can take weeks or months to add a simple feature like velocity sensitivity to a Korg Volca. Now, amateur hackers are able to turn Temu synths into full-fledged grooveboxes in just a few days.
Elektron’s Model:Cycles, Digitone, Octatrack and Digitakt business models all gained new capabilities with Claude’s help. Roland’s SP-404 MKII, Ableton’s Push 3 and Move, Akai’s MPC Live and MPC One, as well as the vintage MPC 2000, Novation’s Circuit, Arturia’s MicroFreak, and even Zoom’s 14-year-old Multistomp line of pedals have all seen new custom firmware released in the past month.
Leading the way is a tiny $70 clone of the Yamaha DX-7: the M-Vave FM-1. It was already on its way to becoming the synth of the summer. The low price and faithful recreation of classic FM sounds have made it incredibly popular with new synthesizer buyers, enthusiasts and synthesizers alike. Inevitably, someone wondered how far they could push the hardware and, with the help of AI, started an arms race.
The FM-1 now has dozens of custom firmwares available. Many of the most popular – Felucca, Sloop and x0x – list Claude as a contributor on their GitHub page or include explicit disclosures about their use of AI. Baudgirl is also believed to have been created with the help of AI, but the developer did not respond to a request for comment.
What started out as a surprisingly good, but basic clone of the DX-7, now supports a variety of synthesizer engines, including virtual analog, sample playback, multitrack sequencing, and a variety of user interface designs.
It’s not really shocking that someone would be willing to risk making a $70 Temu synthesizer. Typically, the equipment that has benefited from this wave of ambient-coded custom firmware is older or more affordable.
Roman Rusinov, who posts on Reddit under the name themanro and publishes music under Farlow, has set his sights on the Zoom MS-70CDR. This is a budget-friendly multi-effects pedal from 2012 that has a reputation for punching above its weight, making it a staple of affordable synthesizer setups. He started by discovering ZDL, a project for reverse engineering the Multistomp format, allowing the creation of custom effects. He finally got the pedal to run custom NAM A2 Lite captures and impulse responses (IRs), turning it into a full-fledged modeler capable of emulating vintage amps.
“I was already using AI for some professional tasks and thought this would be a great opportunity to try to learn some fundamentals of vibe-coding and start a project,” he said. The edge. “There was a lot of trial and error to find the limits of the hardware and software.” He says he’s excited to be part of a larger movement. “Somehow it all aligned with all these other projects pushing the boundaries of older material and breathing new life into it. I love it,” he said. “If you have the hardware, you should be able to do whatever you want with it.”
18nelli, the developer behind Modded Cycles, was also motivated by a desire to revitalize some forgotten gear. “I had an Elektron Model:Cycles that frustrated me,” he said. The edge. He said it seemed designed “just to get us to buy their more expensive equipment.” But recent advances in AI have made him believe he could add features to Groovebox, which hasn’t had an official update since May 2021.
So he opened up his Cycles, documented all the parts, and started working with Claude Code to implement his first hack: a six-track sound over USB. This has since exploded into a community project with several mods contributed by others, several standalone custom firmwares, and even the ability to turn your Model:Cycles into Model:Samples. “I think not using LLMs would have been counterproductive,” he said. “I probably would have spent a huge amount of time and energy on just one feature, when my real goal is to create and make music with amazing mods.”
Modded Cycles has definitely been one of the more frenetic projects. I recently saw five firmware updates coming to the announcements channel on his Discord in one day. 18nelli has since said that it plans to pause adding new features and slow down development to polish existing code and iron out some bugs.
New mods and firmware now hit the web almost every day. If there’s a favorite piece of gear in your arsenal that you wish you had a killer feature for, there’s a chance it’ll end up on a GitHub page sooner rather than later. Heck, if you just want your pocket synthesizer to be able to play NES ROMs, that’s a distinct possibility too.
Of course, there is some risk here. These firmwares are often less thoroughly tested than the manufacturer’s official firmware. The response to the modding scene has varied from company to company, with many choosing to remain silent. Elektron has banned links to custom firmware on its forums. In a statement posted on its official forums, the company said: “We will always warn about changes to our firmware and/or machines that could break them… Something that looks like a simple isolated change can cause major problems elsewhere, especially when a later official operating system arrives, and can confuse users as to what features are officially available on our machines.”
Others, like M-Vave, seem to be joining the movement. It recently announced FM1 Open, an open source firmware with additional features, as well as a development kit and firmware flashing tool for the community.
The response to music equipment using AI and ambience coding has been mixed. Devices like the Polyend Endless have sparked some anger. And music creation subreddits are full of people complaining about the slop of ambiance-coded plugins. But so far, the community has been less hostile to ambiance-coded firmware. Perhaps, in part, because giving new life to old instruments helps control their Equipment Acquisition Syndrome (GAS).
Gn tech
