SLOOP 2.5

Two new engines, 77 new sounds, a drum synth, DX7 cartridges in one go, MIDI CCs and 48 kHz USB audio.

PHYS: physical models. An eleventh engine, from Felucca 1.0: the models of DaisySP and Mutable Instruments Rings (Emilie Gillet), ported to the FM-1 by Leo Kuroshita. Plucked and struck strings, bars and bells, drum heads, and strings with sympathetic strings that ring along. 26 sounds: guitars (NYLON GTR, STEEL GTR, MUTED GTR), PLUCK BASS, KOTO, BANJO, SITAR and TANPURA, PHYS HARP, CHIMES, BIG BELL, VIBRA BAR, STEEL PAN, WOOD BLOCK, CELLO BOW, GLASS BOWL, TABLA, CONGA, TIMPANI and more. Three voices a track (SITAR and the other sympathetic-string sounds: two).

NOISE. A twelfth engine, from Felucca 1.0: noise from analogue to digital, coloured from white to brown, crackle, shift registers and metallic tones, through a resonant filter. WIND, RAIN, OCEAN, VINYL, HISS, RISER, NZ SNARE, BITCRUSH, RADIO, NZ ARCADE, NZ METAL.

153 factory sounds (76 in 2.4), every one level-matched. Besides PHYS and NOISE: bass guitar, mono and saw basses, harp, steel drum, glockenspiel, celesta, xylophone, tubular bell, pan flute, harmonica, accordion, a 70s string machine (ENSEMBLE), an 80s poly synth, rock and chapel organs, granular clouds (STR CLOUD, SHIMMER, DRONE, PNO FREEZE, HORN CLOUD), chip sounds (NES BASS, CHIP CHORD, WAVE LEAD…), CZ lead, pad and reso, ROBOT and VOX PAD. PRESETS browses them by kind, as before.

No memory more. GRAIN, FM6 and PHYS now keep their big per-track state in one shared area (a track plays one engine at a time, and a switch fades the old one out first), so the two new engines cost no memory at all. The pitch table takes 768 bytes instead of 8 KB. Every sound of 2.4 renders bit for bit as before.

The web editor: piano roll, MIDI files, song. On the Sequencer page: a length control (1–64 steps, the steps redraw at once); a piano roll to draw, delete and stretch notes and chords with the mouse; Export MIDI and Import MIDI for the selected track (the drum track too, as GM drum notes), with a preview that says what moves or does not fit before anything is written. A new Song page edits the order of the sections A–D, as the FM-1's SONG screen does (send it while the song is stopped). Thanks to the viewer who suggested them!

Drum synth: make your own drum kits. A new page in the web editor opens up the synthesised drum sounds: for each of the 16 sounds the tone (sine, triangle, square, FM or bell, its pitch and pitch drop, hold and decay, a second partial), the click, the noise (white, the 808's metal, chip, the clap's bursts), a resonant filter with its envelope, drive and level, and the kit's crush. The FM-1 plays every change at once. Four kits of your own, SYN1–SYN4, start as copies of 808, 909, TRAP and TECHNO, or of any of the 32 kits; they come last in the drum track's KIT, with the name you gave them. Store on the FM-1 keeps them; backups hold them; Save file / Open file to share a kit.

DX7 cartridges in one go. Drop a .syx file on the editor's FM6 panel (or import it as before), tick up to 27 of its voices (the first 27 are ticked) and Store cartridge in bank puts them in B1, B2… in order, in one flash write. It asks before replacing what is already there, and the rest of the bank stays. Before storing, choose to add them to the user presets too: each voice gets a user preset with its name, so the FM-1's PRESETS and SELECT find it by name like any sound (or pick them with PTCH, B1–B27). Thanks to the viewer who asked!

A delay send for the drums. GLO → DRUMS → DLY, next to REV, sends the drum track into the tempo delay (FX → DLY sets its time and feedback): echoing hats, dub snares. CC 94 on the drum channel sets it too, and projects keep it. At 0, the default, the drums sound exactly as before. Thanks to the viewer who asked!

USB audio at 48 kHz too. The FM-1's USB audio input now also runs at 48 kHz when the host asks for it: many phones, tablets and apps only take 48 kHz. Plug the FM-1 into your phone and record it into a sampler app. The FM-1 resamples its 44.1 kHz output itself (after Felucca 1.1.5, with a smaller filter); at 44.1 kHz nothing changed.

MIDI CCs: a controller's knobs set the sound. The standard CC map of Felucca 1.1.5, on the track the channel plays (as the notes): 7 level, 10 pan, 74 the track's filter (64 off, lower a low-pass, higher a high-pass), 71 resonance, 73 / 75 / 72 attack / decay / release, 5 glide, 91 / 93 / 94 the reverb, chorus and delay sends. On the drum channel, 7, 91 and 94 are GLO → DRUMS → LVL, REV and DLY. Until now SLOOP ignored every CC. IN = CLOCK ignores them too.

Room for what comes next. The sampled ACOUSTIC kit's crash and ride now fade out smoothly after 0.6 s (they used to stop abruptly at 1 s): 12.8 KB of flash back, the rest of every sound as before.

Swing reads 0 to 100. 0 is straight, 100 the strongest (a step pair played 75 / 25, MPC's 75 %); it used to read 50–75 %. The swing itself and your projects did not change.

SEL, as printed on the button. The key / scale button (between FX and ENV) is now called SEL everywhere: on the screen (its pages SEL and SEL 2, the calibration) and in the guides. It was written SCL, which was confusing. Not to be mixed up with the SELECT knob.

The DRUMS page's level dial goes from ghost on the left to hard on the right. Its needle followed the wrong order; the levels themselves were right. Thanks for the report!

Fixed (2.4.1, folded into 2.5)

• Imported DX7 patches no longer play noise. An FM6 operator with amplitude modulation sensitivity (AMS above 0, about one DX7 patch in four) played noise and static, worse with every key held. Those patches now sound as on a DX7.
• The click is back with your own drum kits (KIT USR1–USR4, USR3+4), and with the drum track muted or another track soloed: it has its own sound now, a short tick, higher on the first beat. Its level follows GLO → DRUMS → LVL.
• Chords on the STEP page. In chord mode, a key on the SEQ → STEP page writes the whole chord it plays (with the CHORD+ black keys too), not only its root.

Install

Connect the FM-1 by USB, open the web installer in Chrome or Edge and press INSTALL. Your projects, user presets, samples, kits, FM6 bank and settings are kept. Projects, autosaves and backups from 2.4 load as they are.

Going back to 2.4 is possible at any time. A track that plays PHYS or NOISE opens with another engine there, and 2.4 does not keep your SYN drum kits (a drum track on SYN1–4 plays USR3+4 there): save a backup first (editor → Projects → Backup), it holds them for when you come back.

Thanks

Leo Kuroshita / Hügelton Instruments for Felucca, the PHYS and NOISE engines, the MIDI CC map and the 48 kHz USB audio; Emilie Gillet and Electrosmith for the models of Rings and DaisySP (MIT); and everyone who commented, reported a bug or asked for a sound.

Files

• sloop-2.5.fwsc: the firmware package
• Source: this tag (GPL-3.0)