Quixotic7/ChoralRootFM1 v0.18 on GitHub

ChoralRoot 0.18 (in progress)

Sounds

Five engines instead of eleven. PHASE, LOFI, VOICE, TRIO and NOISE are retired, and so is PHYS (see
PHYS is retired at the end). They came with Felucca, the
firmware ChoralRoot is built on, and were never part of what ChoralRoot is; their place is wanted for new effects.
The engines are now FM6, FM TONE, VA, CZ-1 and WHEEL, in that order in the engine picker (SELECT steps them).
Their 33 factory presets go with them.

If you saved sounds on one of the six:

Nothing is deleted. Each sound stays in its slot under its name, and a backup or the device manager still holds
it exactly as you saved it.
It no longer sounds as it did. You find it at the end of the VA's presets. Picking it plays the VA's plain
starting sound with your sound's effect sends, attack and release, and the screen says PHASE retired: stand-in
(or LOFI, VOICE, TRIO, NOISE, PHYS). Edit it from there and save it to keep a VA sound in its place.
The device manager shows it in the VA's tab as PHASE · retired; the installer page's Sounds table and
fm1_install.py --sounds list it with its engine and retired.
If the chord sound or the bass sound was on one of these engines when you update, it comes up on FM6 TINE EP
or VA DEEP SUB, as on a new unit. Your other settings are kept.
A backup made on 0.17 restores on 0.18 without error, with the same result.

Going back: on 0.17 these sounds play on their own engines again, as long as you did not save over them.

CZ-1 is lighter. A full CZ-1 chord asked more of the processor than any other sound: eight notes of a two-line
tone took about two thirds of the time the FM-1 has for each moment of sound, and with the new reverb and delay
ringing on top there was too little left, which you hear as crackles. The engine now does the same work in about a
third of that time. Hold eight-note CZ-1 chords with the bass, the reverb and the delay all running. Nothing about
the sound changes: every tone plays sample for sample as it did, and your saved CZ-1 sounds are untouched. The mix
and the master behind every engine are a little lighter as well.

Effects

A new reverb and a new delay. The old reverb (Room or Spring) and the old single echo are replaced.

The reverb is one large, slow space. Size takes it from a hall to something far bigger, Decay from 0.3 s to
72 s and, at the top, Inf: the reverb holds what is in it until you turn Decay down. The tail moves slowly
inside (Mod) and never rings. New controls: Decay, Pre-delay, Mod, Low cut (keeps the bass out of it), Width.
The delay is stereo, after the Moog Matriarch's: a time for the left side and a Spread that makes the right
side a part of it (synced: 1:1, 3:4, 2:3, 1:2; free: down to half), Stereo or Ping-pong, synced to the tempo with
dotted and triplet values or free in milliseconds, up to three quarters of a second a side. Its repeats are as
bright as the note at first; each one is darker than the last (Tone), with a slow Wow if you want it. Changing
the time or the tempo bends the pitch of the repeats for a moment, like a tape echo, and never clicks. Turned up,
Feedback keeps a short echo ringing for many seconds and a long one for minutes: a tail dies away evenly and is
never cut.
Two knobs read the way you expect (after the first try on the unit): the reverb's Size picture is a room
whose inner box grows as Size grows (it used to get tighter; see the end of these notes), and the delay's Time
now gets FASTER
clockwise: a shorter time, a smaller note value, the echoes in its picture closer together. The values and what
they are called have not changed (1/8, 248 ms), and a saved delay time is what it was.
The FX layer has seven pages on SELECT: Sends (below), Reverb 1, Reverb 2, Chorus, Delay 1, Delay 2, Drive.
The small line above the effect's name shows the page (fx · on · 1/2). Seven new pictures on the cells.
The effects and their sends belong to the instrument, not to the sound. The reverb's, the chorus's and the
delay's settings are set once for the whole FM-1. So are the sends: the chord part has one send into each effect
and its drive (KNOB 4 on an effect's first page, named Send), the bass part has its own (in the bass sound's
editor, FX group). Turning PRESETS, changing the engine or loading a saved sound changes none of it: step
through the sounds and hear each one in the same reverb and delay. Everything is back when you switch on.
FX off is off for the bass too. Until 0.17 a bass sound with a reverb send kept its reverb with FX off.
The chorus and the drive are as they were.

What you will notice after updating:

The reverb and the delay start at their new defaults (a 3 s reverb, a 1/8 ping-pong delay). What you had set
for the old ones (size, damp, type; time, feedback, colour) is not carried over: the old values mean nothing to
the new effects. The chorus's settings and all saved sounds are unchanged.
Sounds no longer bring their own sends. Until 0.17 every preset and every saved sound set the four sends when
you picked it; now the sends stay where you put them. The chord part starts with the sends of the power-on sound
(reverb 35, chorus 45, delay 25, no drive) or with the ones you last had; the bass with a little reverb. A sound
you saved for its heavy reverb loads with the reverb you have now: set the Send once. The send values inside
saved sounds are still there (nothing is rewritten), they are just not used. MIDI: CC 91 / 93 / 94 set the
part's sends, and a program change no longer resets them.
The same send gives the same loudness as before: of the reverb under a held chord, and of each echo
(measured, within half a decibel). The reverb tail is longer than the old room's.
Once the tails have died away the effects cost nothing. Sounding, they need more of the processor than the old
ones did.
Long tails and storing. Storing stops the sound for a moment. What the FM-1 stores by itself (the Options) it
stores only when it is quiet, and a ringing reverb or echo is not quiet: with Decay at Inf not until you turn it
down or tap FX off. The global save (SAVE held, below) does not wait: into a ringing tail you hear a short gap.

In the engine picker the keys always play. Hold EDIT (or turn PRESETS in the editor): SELECT steps the engines,
KNOB 1 the presets, and the root keys and chord keys play, so that you hear each sound as you turn to it. Until
0.17 the white root keys chose the engine there unless KNOB 4 switched them to playing; that switch is gone, KNOB 4
does nothing in the picker.

Going back to 0.17: its own effects are there again with their defaults, sounds bring their own sends again (a sound
saved on 0.18 carries the sends the part had when you saved it), and the engine picker's roots play until you turn
its KNOB 4.

MANUAL section 8; how they are built: docs/FX.md.

The looper

Loops are saved by hand. A loop lives in memory while you record, overdub, undo, clear or edit it. It is
written to its slot by the global save (SAVE held), and when you move to another slot (the loop you leave is saved
first, as before). It is no longer written each time it stops. Two things follow: nothing interrupts the sound while
you record and play, and a loop you recorded over by accident is not lost: GLO + SAVE brings back the loop as
last saved, and so does switching off and on. The PLAY menu marks a slot whose loop is not saved yet with a small
square in its corner.

The PLAY menu has two pages. SELECT turns the page (it used to set the length). Page 1: KNOB 1 Length, KNOB 2
Rate, KNOB 3 Quantize, KNOB 4 Count-in. Page 2: KNOB 1 Level. What the keys do in the menu (play, or the slot
shortcuts) is on GLO alone, as in the KEY layer; the Keys cell is gone, and the bottom line shows the page and the
keys' job.

Rate. The loop can run slower or faster than it was recorded: x1/16, x1/12, x1/8, x1/6, x1/4, x1/2, x3/4, x1, x1.5,
x2, x4. It stays
locked to the tempo (no drift), the pitch does not change, and the metronome, the count-in and MIDI clock out stay
the tempo's. A change while the loop plays takes effect when the loop next starts, so nothing jumps.

Step entry is a step sequencer. A step is a sixteenth note, 16 steps are a bar, and a pattern has up to 64 steps
(four bars); Rate scales it (x2: thirty-seconds, x1/2: eighths). Each chord you enter takes the next step, and a new
root is a new step even while you keep the chord key held or latched with LOCK. With Length Free the loop is exactly
the steps you entered (three chords: three steps; it is no longer rounded up to a bar), up to 64 (64 steps: full);
with a Length in bars the pattern is that many bars, four at most. Quantize has no part in it: in Step mode its cell
reads 1/16.

The loop editor. In the PLAY menu, EDIT shows the loop as a pattern of sixteenth-note steps, four rows of 16: the
filled steps, the steps a longer note still sounds in, the selected step and, while the loop plays, the step being
played. PRESETS picks a step (with GLO held, 8 steps a click); playing a chord replaces what is in it; REC clears it;
SELECT turns its two pages. Page Step: KNOB 1 sets how long the step's notes sound, a quarter, a half or three
quarters of a step, then 1 to 64 steps, and moves nothing else (a long note sounds over the following steps, which
still play); KNOB 2 is the number of steps in the loop, 1 to 64 (with GLO held: straight to 8, 16, 32, 48 or 64);
KNOB 3 the step's Chance; KNOB 4 its velocity. Page Trig: KNOB 1 Ratchet, KNOB 2 Condition, KNOB 3 Voicing.
LOOP plays and stops as ever; OCT- and OCT+ change the octave, as on the main screen; HOME or EDIT closes it.

Ratchet, Condition, Chance and a voicing per step. A step can strike its notes two, three or four times inside
the step (Ratchet); play only on some passes of the loop (Condition: 1:2, 2:2, 1:3 .. 4:4, 1st, not 1st); play only some of the time (Chance, 100 % down to 10 %); and have its own voicing instead of the live one
(Voicing, also on ALGORITHM while the editor is open). They belong to the step, chord and bass note together, and the
grid marks the steps that have them. They are saved with the loop; a loop that uses none of them is saved exactly as
before, and 0.14 to 0.17 load a loop that does use them and play it without them. A loop played by hand opens at any Quantize setting, shown on the same grid without a note being
moved; one longer than 64 steps is shown 64 at a time. After an edit the looper's undo has nothing to take back: the
way back is GLO + SAVE.

A loop keeps your bass line on the bass. With Single = Split Bass the keys below the split play the bass
part's sound. Until now the looper recorded such a note as an ordinary note, so the loop played your bass line back
with the chord sound. Now a note played on the bass side is recorded as a bass note and the loop plays it on the
bass part: the bass sound, and the bass channel on MIDI out.

Which side a note is on is decided when you record it, and kept. Set Single back to Full, move the split point,
change the keyboard between Chords and Full or switch the bass off while the loop plays: its bass notes stay on
the bass, its other notes stay on the chord sound. A note recorded on the chord side never moves to the bass
because you turn Split Bass on later.
It holds in every record mode (Overwrite, Advance, Overdub, Replace, Step: a bass-side key entered as a step is a
bass step), through undo and quantize, in a saved slot, after switching off, and in a backup.
The bass register (KNOB 2 on the view) moves a looped bass line by octaves, as it moves the bass keys. The chord
voicing and Transpose do not change it; the loop holds the notes as you played them.
You can play bass by hand over a looped bass line. The bass part is one voice, so the note played last is the
one you hear, as with two keys; no note is left hanging when either ends.
With Split Bass off and the bass switched on while such a loop plays, the bass follows the loop's chords and the
recorded bass notes play as well, on the same single voice.
A looped bass note glows on the keys of its note name like the loop's other notes.

Loops recorded with 0.17 or earlier are unchanged: bass-side notes in them were stored as ordinary notes and keep
the chord sound. Record them again to have them on the bass.

Going back: a loop recorded with 0.18 loads on 0.14 to 0.17 and plays there with its bass-side notes on the chord
sound, as those versions recorded them. If the older version saves that loop again (it does when a changed loop
stops), the bass side is lost from it. The size of a loop in memory and in a slot has not changed.

Fixed: PRESETS in the PLAY menu sometimes changed the sound. Holding LOOP and turning PRESETS chooses a loop slot.
With the menu already open, holding LOOP a moment longer closed the menu again (a layer's button held twice closes
it), and PRESETS then changed the chord sound's preset instead. Now a knob turned while the button is still held
opens the menu again and acts in it: LOOP held + PRESETS is always the slot. The same holds for the other layers'
buttons.

Saving is manual: SAVE held, and GLO + SAVE to go back

Until now the FM-1 forgot a good part of what you were doing when you switched it off, and what it did keep it
stored by itself, whenever the instrument fell quiet. Both change: the FM-1 now keeps much more, and it keeps it
when you say so. Switch off, switch on: it comes back as you last saved it. (An earlier build of 0.18 stored
all of this by itself, "where you left off". That is replaced by the rule below.)

Hold SAVE (past the hold time, no other button): the global save. Everything about how the FM-1 is set up
to play is stored as it is now, and the loop with it. The screen says saved. No question.
Hold GLO and SAVE together for a second: revert. The FM-1 is back at your last save, as after switching
off and on: notes off and the loop stopped as with PANIC, then the saved state, the saved loop included. The
screen says reverted. Change a bunch of things, an edit, a loop; then keep them with SAVE held, or take them
back with GLO + SAVE.
A SAVE tap is the save-preset dialog, as before; a preset is stored at once.
The Options menu is still stored by itself (Play Style, Extension Addition, Secret Chords, Velocity, the MIDI
channels and clock, Raw Chord Sound, Motion, LEDs, Hold Time, USB Record, USB Level, Dual Core), and the panel
calibration: a moment after the instrument falls quiet, never while a loop plays, as in 0.17. A revert leaves them.
SAVE held no longer shows the loop slots (Save / Load / Delete on the white keys). The PLAY menu covers it.

What a global save keeps, and so what comes back:

Both sounds as they are, with changes you have not saved as a preset. (An edit is still lost when you turn
PRESETS to another sound: a SAVE tap makes it a preset.)
The parts' Level and Pan, and so the bass level.
The bass being on. Until 0.17 the bass was off at every power-on; that rule is gone. On a new unit it is off.
The voicing (KNOB 1) and the octave shift.
LOCK and the chord it latched: the same type and extensions are lit when you switch on.
The effects in full: the page you had picked, every setting of the reverb, the chorus and the delay (see
Effects above) and both parts' sends.
And what 0.17 kept by itself: Key Mode and the KEY layer's settings (Single Notes and the split point with them),
the performance mode and whether it is on, LATCH, the tempo and the metronome, the bass behaviour and register, the
view and its lock, which sound each part plays, the looper's settings and its slot. These are no longer stored
by themselves: hold SAVE. Bass Behaviour, Single Notes, Split Point and View are also entries of the Options
menu; they go with their layer and are part of the global save.

On purpose it does not bring back: notes that were sounding, a playing loop (its slot is loaded, stopped: the
FM-1 never starts playing by itself), a take you were recording, an open layer, menu or the editor (it starts on the
view).

What you hear. Writing to the FM-1's memory stops the sound for about 45 ms for each thing written; a global save
writes one to three things (the settings, the state of the instrument, the loop), and only those that changed. In
silence: nothing. Into a held chord or a ringing tail: one to three short gaps, and the sound goes on. It is your
press, so it does not wait for silence; it does wait for a playing loop to stop (saves at stop). The Options, stored
by themselves, still wait for silence.

A new FM-1 starts with the defaults. An FM-1 that ran an earlier 0.18 build or 0.17 keeps what it had stored: that
is its last save. The update gesture (below) and a backup do not save for you: hold SAVE first.

Options > Reset Settings clears it with the settings and stores the result at once: afterwards the FM-1 is as a
new unit is, with no SAVE held needed. SAFE MODE's Flash Data erases it too.

Backups are unchanged: a backup holds the settings (as last saved), your saved sounds and your loops, not the
state of the instrument above. After restoring a backup the FM-1 starts from the restored settings.

Going back to 0.17: it reads 0.18's settings as its own (every option, the calibration), starts as 0.17 always
did (bass off, voicing 0, saved sounds), and ignores the rest. If you return to 0.18 after 0.17 has stored a setting,
0.18 starts from 0.17's settings and not from its own older save.

For the technically minded: the options stay in the 192-byte settings record (now version 15, same size and layout,
which is why 0.17 and the backup tools read it unchanged); the rest is a new 1024-byte session record in two flash
sectors of its own (0xB4000 / 0xB5000), written only by the global save, with 142 bytes of reserve and an effects block stored by tag, which is how
the new delay and reverb and the bass part's sends came in without a new format (21 new tags; the six of the old
effects are retired).
docs/SETTINGS.md.

Playing

Keys respond at once, whatever the screen is drawing. Until now a key struck while the screen was being redrawn
waited for the picture to finish before its note started: usually a few milliseconds, but a whole-screen redraw (a
new chord name, a page turn, the SCOPE view) could hold a note back by a few hundredths of a second, enough to feel
in a fast passage. Now the keys are read while the screen draws, and a note or a chord starts as soon as the key is
seen. Nothing about what the keys do has changed.

Update mode: OCT-, OCT+ and HOME

Hold OCT-, OCT+ and HOME for five seconds to put the FM-1 into update mode while it runs. The two OCT keys do
their PANIC as they go down; with all three held, a red countdown starts after two seconds (update mode: let go to cancel), and at five the FM-1 restarts into update mode: three short flashes, a black screen. Open the installer
and press Install, or switch off and on to start ChoralRoot again; nothing was written. Letting go of any of the
three before the end cancels, and nothing else happens (no HOME, no octave step). It works in SAFE MODE too.

OCT- and OCT+ alone no longer do anything when held beyond their PANIC. Until 0.17, holding the two for five
seconds was the gesture: too easy to hit by accident.
It is real update mode now. The old gesture went to the chip's own USB boot (the WL82 UBOOT1.00 disk), which
the installer cannot use, although the screen said update mode. The new one hands over to the update loader, the
same way OCT- held at power-on does, so the web installer and fm1_install.py find the FM-1 and install.
The gesture does not save for you: the FM-1 comes back as last saved (above). Hold SAVE first if you want what you
have set to survive the update.
On an FM-1 whose ChoralRoot was not installed by ChoralRoot's own installer since 0.16 (no boot stub ran), there is
no loader to hand over to: the countdown then says USB boot: let go to cancel and the gesture goes to the chip's
USB boot as before. Switch off and on to leave it.

The sends: one page, one value

The FX layer opens on Sends. Hold FX: the first page shows the chord part's four send levels side by side, Drive,
Chorus, Delay and Reverb on KNOB 1 to KNOB 4: the same four, in the same order and on the same knobs, as the FX group
of the sound editor. SELECT +1 is Reverb 1 and the pages you know, each one step later. The Send cells on the
effects' own pages are still there and are the same values. The layer comes back on the page you left it on; an
FM-1 updated from an earlier 0.18 build opens on the effect's page it had.

The editor's FX group shows the real sends. With FX off, the sound editor's FX group read 0 % for all four of
the chord part's sends, whatever they were set to in the FX layer, and the first click of a knob there started from
0, switched the effects on and made the other three jump back to their values. Now the editor and the FX layer show
and set one and the same value: change a send in either and the other has it at once, FX on or off, and a click in
the editor steps from the send as it is. The same holds for a send set over MIDI (CC 91 / 93 / 94) and for FM TONE's
Drive on its AMP page, which is the part's drive: it no longer snaps back when FX is switched off and on.

The reverb's Size picture: only the inner box changes. The picture is a room seen from the front, an outer box
with an inner box for the far wall. The outer box now stays as it is; the inner box is small when Size is small and
large when Size is large, and never reaches the outer one. (An earlier 0.18 build made the whole picture grow and
shrink; before that the inner box got smaller as Size went up.) Nothing about the sound changed.

Slower loop Rates: x1/6, x1/8, x1/12, x1/16. The Rate knob (PLAY menu, KNOB 2) goes four steps further down:
... x1/2, x1/4, x1/6, x1/8, x1/12, x1/16. At x1 a step of a pattern is a sixteenth note and 16 steps are a bar; at
x1/8 a step is a half note, at x1/12 three quarters, and at x1/16 a step is a whole bar, so a 64-step pattern is
64 bars long. Everything inside the loop stretches with it: note lengths, a step's 1/4, 1/2 and 3/4 lengths, ratchets
(at x1/16 a ratchet x4 is four quarter notes), conditions (they count the loop's passes) and the position on the
screen. The metronome, the count-in, MIDI clock and the arpeggiator stay the tempo's. Two things to know: a take you
play by hand at a very slow rate is stored more coarsely (at x1/16 and 120 BPM to about a twelfth of a second; steps
you enter are exact), and a Length in bars counts the loop's own bars (1 bar at x1/16 is 16 bars of the metronome).
Your saved Rate is kept. If you go back to an earlier 0.18 build with one of the four new rates saved, that build
starts at x1.

PHYS is retired

PHYS, the physical-modelling engine, is gone too. It has chords built in (its sympathetic strings are tuned to a
chord of their own above each note), which works against what ChoralRoot does with chords, and FM6 and FM TONE
cover much of its ground: bells, mallets, plucks, bars. The engine picker now has five engines: FM6, FM TONE, VA,
CZ-1 and WHEEL. PHYS's nine factory presets (BELL TREE, MARIMBA, PLUCK, BOWED METAL, KALIMBA, HAND DRUM, TOMS, DRONE STRING,
HARP) go with it, and so does its pack in the device manager.

If you used PHYS, it is treated exactly as the five engines above:

A sound you saved on PHYS is not deleted. It stays in its slot under its name, and you find it at the end of
the VA's presets. Picking it plays the VA's plain starting sound with your sound's attack and release, and the
screen says PHYS retired: stand-in. Edit it from there and save it to keep a VA sound in its place, or delete
it to free the slot. A PHYS sound that was saved over a PHYS factory preset is one of these too.
If the chord sound or the bass sound was on PHYS when you update (as last saved with SAVE held), it comes up on FM6 TINE EP or VA DEEP SUB, as on a new unit. Everything else you had
set is kept, Bass on included.
Loops are not affected: a loop holds chords, not sounds, and plays on whatever the two sounds are.
Backups: a backup made on 0.17 or on an earlier 0.18 build restores without error, with the same result. The
device manager shows a PHYS sound in the VA's tab as PHYS · retired; the installer page's Sounds table and
fm1_install.py --sounds list it with its engine and retired. The device manager still takes a PHYS sound file, as such a slot.
Going back to 0.17: your PHYS sounds play on PHYS again, as long as you did not save over them or delete them.

It frees 9.3 KB of the firmware's flash and 12 KB of the memory the engines' voices share, which the effects and the
other engines can use.

SEQ opens the loop editor; the metronome moved into the PLAY menu. The loop editor was two steps away (hold LOOP,
then EDIT). Now tap SEQ on the main screen and you are in it. SEQ goes round three places: the main screen, the
loop editor, the PLAY menu, the main screen. So a second tap is the PLAY menu and a third brings you back; in the
PLAY menu SEQ always leaves, however you got there, and EDIT opens the editor as before. In the editor, holding
LOOP now goes to the PLAY menu (it used to drop you on the main screen), EDIT goes back to the PLAY menu as it did,
and HOME goes to the main screen (it used to stop at the PLAY menu). The editor's bottom line ends SEQ: back;
the SEQ light blinks with EDIT's in the editor and is lit in the PLAY menu. SEQ no longer switches the metronome:
that is Metronome, On / Off, on KNOB 2 of the PLAY menu's page 2 (beside Level), and from anywhere outside the
sound editor GLO held + SEQ (metronome on). Holding SEQ is still its hold menu, the metronome's (time signature, click level),
and a SEQ tap in that layer still switches the click. In the other layers and in the Options a SEQ tap does nothing.
Your saved metronome setting is kept.

The loop editor's grid shows more

In the loop editor (PLAY menu, EDIT) each step now tells you what is in it:

The white bar is the selected step's length, and it starts on the selected step. It runs along the foot of
every step the note sounds in, into the next row and round the loop's end if it is that long. A Note len of 1/4,
1/2 or 3/4 is a bar a quarter, half or three quarters of the step wide. No other step has a bar, so the bar
never points at a step you have not selected.
The selected step's outline no longer disappears as it blinks: it pulses bright and dim.
A step's colour is its velocity: red at the usual 100, darker and cooler down to plum when softer, lighter up
to peach when louder.
Chance is a yellow strip down the step's right side, over its full height, dimmer the lower the chance (nearly
black at 10 %). With a Condition the strip is blue. It replaces the small notch.
A Ratchet is two, three or four small ticks along the step's top.
The step's Voicing follows its chord's name in blue (Dm7 +3), on both pages, when the step has a voicing of
its own. On Follow, and on a step with single notes only, nothing is added.

A send reads the same everywhere: 0 % to 100 %

The same send used to read 74 in the Send cell of the Reverb page and 75% on the Sends page, and one click of
the knob moved it a little less in the first place than in the second. Now there is one read-out and one step:

Every send is shown in per cent, 0% to 100%: on the Sends page, in the Send cell of Reverb 1, Chorus,
Delay 1 and Drive, in the sound editor's FX group (the chord sound's and the bass sound's), and in the large number
that KNOB 4 on the main screen or a MIDI controller (CC 91, 93, 94) puts up, which now has a % under it and a
meter that is full at 100.
One click is the same everywhere, about 5 %, and 0% and 100% are reached exactly from each of these places.
(The Send cells and KNOB 4 used to move about 3 % a click.)

Nothing about the sound changed, and your saved sends are the same sends: only the number on the screen and the size
of a click are different. FM TONE's Drive on its AMP page is still a plain number, like the Level and Pan beside it.

The loop editor: while it plays, Transpose, a held ratchet

Only what you play goes into a step. With LATCH on (or the arp's Hold), a chord played into a step was not
written when you let the keys go, because a latched chord keeps sounding. It was written at your next press, into
whatever step was selected by then. So a step got the chord that was still sounding instead of the keys you were
playing. Now the step has the chord as soon as the keys are up, latch or no latch. The loop's own notes never went
into a step and still do not.
The name under the grid is always the selected step's, also while the loop plays. Only while you hold keys down
does it show the chord you are playing. Before, it could show a latched chord, or flip between the played chord and
the step's as the loop went by.
While the loop plays, its current chord or note is named in blue at the left of the page's name (Step /
Trig). The page's name does not move. The name stays until the next step that sounds and goes when the loop
stops.
Transpose is KNOB 4 on the Trig page. It moves the selected step's notes up or down a semitone a click: C major
one click up is C# major. Chords, single notes and bass notes in the step all move. It works in semitones also with
Key Mode on. The cell shows the step's root note (C#4), and how far you moved it while you turn (+1).
GLO held + the voicing knob jumps between Follow and 0 (ALGORITHM on either page, KNOB 3 on the Trig page).
From any other value, clockwise is 0 and the other way is Follow. In the loop editor this is what GLO +
ALGORITHM does (on the main screen it is the bass sound's engine, and the bass level is BASS + ALGORITHM: the last
section of these notes).
A ratchet on a long note holds its last strike. With a Note len longer than one step, the strikes before the
last are as short as before and the last one lasts to the end of the note. Ratchet x2, Note len 2: half a step,
then a step and a half. Ratchet x4, Note len 4: three quarter-step notes, then one of three and a quarter steps.
Until now a ratcheted step was silent after its own step whatever its Note len. With a Note len of one step or
less nothing changed. A loop you saved with a ratchet on a long note will now sound that note on.

GLO + REC changes the record mode, and the sound read-out names the engine

Hold GLO and tap REC: the next record mode. Overwrite, Advance, Overdub, Replace, Step, and round to Overwrite
again, with a message that names it (Rec: Overdub). It works wherever GLO + SEQ does: on the main screen, in the
PLAY menu (where ALGORITHM still sets it), in the other layers and in the loop editor; not in the sound editor,
where GLO is SHIFT. It never starts, arms or stops a recording, and in the loop editor it does not clear the step.
REC on its own does everything it did. If you change the mode in the middle of a take, an overdub or step entry,
that goes on and ends as it began, and the new mode counts from the next REC: the same as turning ALGORITHM in the
PLAY menu at that moment.
Turning PRESETS on the main screen shows the engine's name in orange above the number, and the bottom line,
which read FM6 · 02/25, now reads Hold OPT to change engine: the stripes already show how many presets
there are and where you are. For the bass sound (ALGORITHM, or a BASS tap) the engine's name is over the number in
the same way and the bottom line is the same, because GLO + ALGORITHM changes the bass engine (the last section
of these notes). With Bass Behaviour Solo the top line reads VA · solo. In the
sound editor's picker, where OPT + PRESETS does nothing, the read-out is as it was.
The key printed SEQ is now called SEQ in the manual, the site and the tables (it was METRO): its tap opens
the sequencer, and the metronome is in the PLAY menu's page 2, on GLO + SEQ and in the SEQ key's hold menu.

Major chords read `CM`, the bass engine is on GLO + ALGORITHM, the bass level on BASS + ALGORITHM

A major chord now reads with a capital M: CM. Until now a major chord was its root alone, C, the same
as the single note C. This is so on every screen that names a chord: the big name on the main screen's views,
the PERF layer's arp band, and the sequencer (the name under the grid, the playing name, step entry). A single
note still reads C, minor still Cm. A major chord with an extension reads as before, without the M: C7,
CM7 (the major seventh), C6, C9, C6 9. Nothing changes in what is played or saved: loops and their steps
are the same, only the text is new.
Hold GLO and turn ALGORITHM: the bass sound's engine, the same way GLO + PRESETS changes the chord sound's
engine: the engines go by while GLO is held, and when you let go the bass is on the one in the middle, at the
sound you last used there. On the main screen only, like GLO + PRESETS. A bass that is off stays off. The bass
read-out's bottom line now reads Hold OPT to change engine, as the chord sound's does. BASS + EDIT, then EDIT
held, still works.
The bass level moved: hold BASS (printed ENV / BASS) and turn ALGORITHM. It was GLO + ALGORITHM. The screen
shows the same bass level read-out and the bass stays on or off as it was. If the BASS layer is open (you held
BASS long enough, or it was open already), the turn moves the layer's Level cell instead and the layer stays
open. Before, BASS held + ALGORITHM opened the BASS layer and changed the bass sound: ALGORITHM alone still does
that, in the layer too.
In the PLAY menu, the other layers and the sound editor, GLO + ALGORITHM was the bass level too: there it now
does what ALGORITHM does without GLO (the record mode in the PLAY menu, the bass sound elsewhere), as GLO +
PRESETS always has. In the loop editor GLO + ALGORITHM is still the Voicing's Follow / 0.

FM TONE's Drive belongs to the sound

An FM TONE preset has its own Drive, as a Digitone sound has. Loading a preset sets it, saving a sound stores
it. It is the Drive cell of the AMP screen (sound editor, ENV group), which still reads 0 to 127. Of the factory
presets, 10 WOBBLE has 10 and the others 0.
It sounds with FX off. FX off still closes the chorus, the delay and the reverb, and the drive of every other
engine.
While the chord part plays FM TONE, the Drive on the FX layer's Sends page (and on its Drive page) is this value,
in per cent. With FX off it stays lit there and the other three cells read off; turning it does not switch the
effects on.
Turning it marks the sound as edited, so SAVE offers to overwrite. A global save (SAVE held) keeps it with the
sound as it is, saved to a preset or not.
The part's own drive, which FM6, the VA, CZ-1 and WHEEL use, waits untouched while the part plays FM TONE and is
back when you change the engine. The bass part works the same way.
This changes how FM TONE sounds in two cases. With FX off, an FM TONE sound whose Drive is above 0 is now
driven. And turning PRESETS on FM TONE now changes the drive: until this build the drive you had set stayed for
every preset. Nothing else sounds different.
Your saved FM TONE sounds load as before, with the drive the part had when you saved them. A sound saved by
0.14 to 0.17 gets the drive it had then. One saved by an earlier 0.18 build gets whatever the part's drive was at
that moment, even if you had set it for another sound, and 0 if FX was off. Check the AMP screen's Drive on your
own FM TONE presets once and save them again where it is not what you want.

ChoralRoot 0.18 for the M-VAVE FM-1 (identity FM-1_920).

Install from the browser at https://quixotic7.github.io/ChoralRootFM1/ (Chrome or Edge, the FM-1 connected by USB), or with the command-line installer: python3 tools/fm1_install.py choralroot-0.18.fwsc.

SHA256SUMS lists the package and the app. The package holds three JieLi AC79 SDK files (Apache-2.0); LICENSE, LICENSING.md and LICENSES.zip carry every licence. Installing firmware is at your own risk.

Full Changelog: v0.17...v0.18

Quixotic7/ChoralRootFM1 v0.18 ChoralRoot 0.18 on GitHub