sbegueria/fm1-dub v1.3.0

DUB-1 1.3.0

on GitHub

DUB-1 1.3.0 is the musical release. After measuring seven classic dub techno albums, the loop now holds the way theirs do, the echo comes back clean and then dissolves, the sound is wider, and the eight pieces are eight different ideas. The chord machine opens up too: the progression DUB-1 is about to play is on the screen, eight chords ahead, to change before it arrives or catch in a loop. The drums and the bass play in phrases you can lock, and the noise is a new voice that rings on the chord.

Try it in the browser: https://sbegueria.github.io/fm1-dub/emu/
Install from Chrome or Edge: https://sbegueria.github.io/fm1-dub/install/
Manual: https://sbegueria.github.io/fm1-dub/manual/

New in 1.3.0

• The Chords page (EDIT) shows the eight chords coming. The random walk that picks DUB-1's chords now writes them into the eight slots ahead of time:

  • the walk's chords are shown in teal. They're degrees of the scale, so they follow the key and the mode when you change them;
  • the chords you write are shown in white, and stay as written;
  • a gap ("(HOLDS)") keeps the chord before it going.

• Endless: the chord playing is always slot 1. When it moves on, every slot moves up one and the walk writes a new chord into slot 8. Change a chord before it comes; make a gap and it stays a gap.

• The walk's character (ALGORITHM on the Chords page): Home ("stays near home": the walk as it was, home often, the IV most), Wander ("roams wider", the new default: more of the scale, rarely bouncing straight back) or Free ("goes anywhere": the most varied). Turning it rewrites the walk's chords at once, so you hear the difference; in Loop it rolls a new loop.

• Endless or Loop (KNOB 4).

• Loop: the eight in turn, nothing new. Switch to it to keep a progression you like as it goes by, and shorten it by turning the last slots into gaps.

• Editing a walk's chord (a key for its root, or KNOB 2 or 3) makes it yours, starting from how it sounds. The page is just the slots now; a knob's help line says the rest.

• ALGORITHM turns the screen view (ripples, scope, spectrum) on every page but a layer's, the Noise page and the Chords page, so you can change the picture wherever you play. The mode, a piece's choice, stays on the Key page (HOME again), safe from a stray turn mid-set.

• The modes, the most common first (ALGORITHM and the Key page): Minor, Major, Dorian, Mixolydian, the pentatonics, Phrygian, Lydian. Aeolian and Ionian are now shown as Minor and Major.

• A new sound, closer to classic dub techno. After measuring DUB-1 against Basic Channel and modern dub techno: the kick softer and further back, the bass held under it and pumping on its own, the chords half an octave higher and brighter, the hats moved down into the 2-8 kHz range, the pings less dry, mono below 150 Hz. The drums and the bass now sit back, as from the next room; the chords come forward.

• The echo, clear then dissolving. The first repeat comes back clean, a copy of the stab on its time; each repeat after it goes through a chain of allpass filters on its way round, softer and darker than the last, until it melts into a wash (the dub way). Each new stab ducks the returns for a moment, so the repeats are heard between the stabs, not over them; a thrown stab's ride over. Less of the echo goes into the plate, and the repeats sit above the chord's low mids, where the mud was. The echo plays from one head (the second joins in only while a thrown stab rings); the Echoplex's short taps are out of the mix.

• A wider sound. The echo's right side a few milliseconds behind its left, and the stabs and the pings each side taking a little of the other's, slowly drifting: the music as wide as the classic records without the voices panned further. Under 80 Hz the mix stays mono. The Echo page's Width sets it all (Fog and Night Drive at 85).

• The Echo page (FX on the Space page, again; FX blinks): Blur (clean repeats to a dissolving wash), Tone (the repeats darker or brighter), Width (the echo, the stabs and the pings mono to wide) and Size (how long the plate rings, until now the piece's alone).

• Feedback is the tail's length, shown in seconds: how long the repeats take to die away, 1.5 s to 15 s. The loop's gain follows the echo's time, so a long echo fades as soon as a short one. Throws, PERFORM's Echo key and the grid's Swell still push it past. The pieces' tails are now 4 to 8 seconds (they were 10 and more).

• Density first, on every layer's page (KNOB 1), and each page's four in a new order:

  • Chord: Density (the stabs a bar), Throws, Wet, Cutoff. Decay moved to the Chord sound page (ENV again), in place of Env, which is now the voice's and the piece's;
  • Pings: Density, Octave (KNOB 2, as the bass's), Wet, Cloud;
  • Bass: Density (was Notes), Octave, Groove, Fifth;
  • Drums: Density (the kick's shapes), Hits, Hats, Tone (the hats dark to bright, from the Drum sound page). Duck moved to PERFORM; Swing is on the Key page only;
  • Noise: Density, Air, Tone, Decay; its level on OCT− / OCT+, as the layers'.

• The sound pages: the chord's is now Attack, Decay, Colour, Reso; the drums' fourth is Hat len (how long the shaker and the open hat ring). The knobs whose lower half did nothing are now one-sided, 0 to 100 from the voice's own: the chord's Attack (slower only), the pings' Bend (more only), the FM pages' Feedback (more only). The sound pages show their layer live (its ripples, scope or spectrum, and the chord's name) in place of the envelope.

• The FM pages' fourth knob is an LFO in time with the bars: the chord's filter over two bars, the pings' brightness over one, the bass's bite over four. It works on every voice, FM or not (the page greys the other three on a voice that isn't FM). Mod dec is gone (the voices keep their own). Ratio is grey and rests on a two-operator algorithm, which has no operators 3 and 4.

• The other new knobs:

  • Throws (Chord): how often a stab is thrown into the echo: none at 0, about one stab in eight at 50, about one in three at 100 (more in a Break). They no longer follow Evolve, but there are none at Evolve 0. A thrown stab's dry is 6 dB down, so it's the echo you hear;
  • Wet (Chord): the stabs dry against their echo, from up front through −6 dB (50) to almost all echo, the echo up to 1.7 times;
  • Wet (Pings): the pings dry against their echo, from up front through as the pieces have them (50) to almost all echo;
  • Density (Bass): how many of the groove's notes play, 100 all of them; fewer, some left out at random, the bar's first kept;
  • Hats (Drums): the shaker and the open hat against the kick, about ±12 dB around the pieces' (50).

• The loop holds: Motion in three regions (marked on its ring at 40 and 70). Under 40, Full only: the kick never leaves, and the music moves by its filter, its echo and its texture, as the classic records do. From 40 to 70, a Groove or a Thin now and then; from 70, Breaks too. Departures are at least 32 bars apart; fills only from 40. PERFORM's Energy and Drop still break it by hand.

• The kick, a few phrases at a time: none, the downbeat, one and three, four with two and four ghosted, or four on the floor, drawn round the Drums page's Density and kept for two to six phrases (Evolve). From Density 90, four on the floor in every Full phrase; at 100, always. A piece starts on four on the floor, and the kick comes back whole after a Break.

• The drums and the bass in phrases: A A A B A A A B. A is the main bar, played exactly the same each time; B, on bars 4 and 8, is a variant drawn once a phrase, sparse (the kick on the downbeat, the shaker on the eighths, the bass every other note) or busy (a ghost kick and the hats' pickup into the next bar, the bass's whole groove). Which of the hats' and the bass's notes rest, the hats' feel (their accents, how late they come) and the bass's octave note are drawn once a phrase too, and are the same every bar, instead of a new throw of the dice on every note. At a phrase's start the plan is kept or drawn again, more often as Evolve rises, never at 0. The shaker's pattern now changes only at a phrase's start. Your own patterns (the Pattern page) play as written, with each lane's Chance.

• Shake everything: hold HOME for 1.5 s and the chord, the pings, the bass, the drums and the noise all take a shake at once (another voice, kit and character, every sound value a big step). Again and again, to explore until something sounds right.

• Lock (SEL held for half a second, from any page; a tap is still PERFORM): found a groove you like? Each new phrase keeps the kick's shape, the noise's groove, the plan (its B bars still B) and the shaker's pattern, and Evolve's own nudges and groove moves rest, while the chords, the sections, the stabs and the pings go on. "lock" shows in red above the page's name. Not saved: off at every start.

• The ghost duck: the music breathes on every beat, the kick or not: a beat without one ducks it a little less, and less again in a Break, so the pumping goes on whatever the kick does.

• Looser and sparser, all of it tightening as Evolve goes to 0: now and then a bar with no stab (about one in five at Evolve 40), more gaps, the stab pattern turning every two bars; each stab its own cutoff (up to half an octave either way), and the arrangement's filter sweep wider (an octave and a half), the echo's band moving further with it; in Auto, the hats looser (some steps resting, wider accents, a few milliseconds late: the phrase's feel, above).

• The noise machine. The noise is no longer a bed but a voice: a crackle groove, hits on a two-bar pattern of sixteenths (redrawn by the phrase, or kept, so a motif comes back; fewer in a Break and Thin), each striking three resonators tuned to the chord's root, third and fifth, low, through a band-pass that keeps almost nothing above 2 kHz. Under it the Air, a quiet hiss, and now and then a dry click. It sits under the duck, deeper than the music: it dips on each beat and swells between. Into the plate, a little into the echo, more on a throw.

• The Noise page, on SAVE: a tap opens it (again, Noise space, below): Density (how many hits in two bars), Air (the hiss), Tone (the rings darker or brighter) and Decay (how long each hit rings on the chord); the level on OCT− / OCT+. ALGORITHM for its character: Vinyl (the groove rung on the chord), Tape (the hiss through the resonators too, a pad swelling between the beats), Dust (dry clicks and bursts, no ringing), Room (on the key's tonic triad, long) or Machine (inharmonic, metallic). Each piece has its own. SAVE held nudges the noise; held on, shakes it.

• Noise space (SAVE again): Width (the rings mono to wide), Plate and Echo (how much of the noise goes into each, none to twice) and LFO (the rings' tone swept over a bar, brightest on beat 2 where the chord's is on beat 3). Each piece has some, and its chord a little of the chord's LFO.

• Eight pieces, eight ideas. After measuring seven classic albums, each piece now follows one: Basic Basic Channel's BCD (held, short stabs, a clean dotted-eighth echo, almost no hats), Steppers Maurizio's M-Series (the most frozen loop, one chord, the open hat on the ands, swing), Chamber Fluxion's Vibrant Forms (128, the chord up front, a half-note echo), Night Drive Intrusion (120, offbeat bass, very wide, a played filter), Concrete Monolake's Hongkong (136, a glassy top, loud hats, deep sweeps), Pressure Porter Ricks' Biokinetics (never breaks, a wide noise bed), Fog Echospace's The Coldest Season (pads, hiss, very wide), Haze the sparse intro. The drums and the bass forward again, the master 2 dB louder, the level steadier.

• The pages in the panel's order: SELECT steps through them as their buttons sit, FX ENV LFO GLO then HOME SAVE ARP SEQ: Space, Chord, Bass, Setup, Dub, Noise, Pings, Drums. Eight dots under the page's name, top right, show where you are. The Texture page is now the Pings page. SELECT from the Noise page goes on from the Noise page's own place in the round.

• One rule for the buttons: a button with one page stays on it when pressed again (EDIT, SEL, GLO); one with several steps through them (HOME: Dub, Key; FX: Space, Echo; SAVE: Noise, Noise space; a layer's: its page, its sound page, its FM or Pattern page). A page's button or SELECT leaves PERFORM (the keys the scale again; SEL brings it back).

• A notch at 0 on every centred knob: turning through, it stops at 0, and leaving it takes three clicks the same way. Switches of up to ten positions show them as dots (Algo, Drift, Mode).

• The levels on OCT− / OCT+: on a layer's page (Chord, Pings, Bass, Drums, Noise, and their sound pages) they turn that layer down or up, 5 a press, held to keep going; the header says it ("BASS 55"), and the level ring shows it (below). Press both together and let go: the layer is muted, its level kept ("BASS MUTED"); again, back. Held five seconds, they still start the update mode, and never mute. PERFORM's mix (white 6 held) has the four levels too, a muted layer's knob grey. The pings' octave moved to the Pings page.

• PERFORM's knobs: Filter, Wet, Energy, Duck. Wet is a master action: the chord's and the pings' Wet, the echo's send and the noise together, the whole music dry and close or drowned in the echo, an offset for playing (not saved). Duck is the piece's own, moved here from the Drums page. (1.2.0's Dub and Space are gone: the Space page has the echo and the reverb, and Wet the echo for playing.)

• True mutes in PERFORM: white 1–5 mute the chord, pings, bass, kick and hats without touching their levels, the same mutes as OCT− + OCT+: a mute made one way shows on the other.

• Saving moved to GLO: hold GLO and let go to save (a card says SAVED); or turn the Setup page's new Save knob (it shows Save while there are unsaved changes, Saved after). Hold GLO on for 1.5 s to put the piece back to its recipe. DUB-1 still saves by itself while resting.

• The nudge: hold a layer's button (ENV the chord, ARP the pings, LFO the bass, SEQ the drums) for half a second, and its sound takes a step somewhere new: three or four of its values each move, like a random walk pulled back to the piece's own sound, so nudges explore round it and never wander off. A card in the middle says what changed, and the layer's sound page comes up with that knob lit.

• The shake: keep holding (1.5 s) for the wild one: the layer gets another voice (the drums another kit) and all its sound values take a big step.

• The bass, sparser or busier: the Groove knob runs from sparse to busy (Drone, Offbeat, Dotted, Sync, Roller), and Density thins any of them; Energy in PERFORM thins or fills the bass line along with the rest.

• The bass's groove moves too: the bass's shake (LFO held on) changes its groove to a neighbour (Drone, Offbeat, Dotted, Sync, Roller), and with Evolve above 60 the groove now and then moves by itself, and comes back, every few minutes at the most.

• The space too (FX): a nudge to the echo, the reverb, the plate and the cloud; its shake gives a new echo time.

• New chords (EDIT held on, 1.5 s): the walk rewrites its whole progression at once (yours, the gaps and the chord playing stay); a shorter hold still moves on to the next chord.

• Evolve nudges too: above 40, now and then on a phrase's first bar, one layer's sound takes a smaller step by itself, so a long run slowly changes colour. It never shakes.

• A card for every long press, in the middle of the screen for a second and a half: a nudge (amber) or a shake (red) with what changed, the next chord (EDIT held; gone the moment the chord changes), new chords (EDIT held on), saved (GLO held), reset (GLO held on), Lock on or off.

• A level ring: OCT− / OCT+ show the layer's level as a big ring in the middle of the screen, in the layer's colour, gliding to the new value; muted, it turns grey. It fades a second after the last press.

• The screen, rearranged: the page's name top right, larger, in teal (PERFORM's there too), the round's dots under it, SOLO beside it, "hold" and "lock" in red above it; the knob strip keeps the voice's name and its rule. The Drift bar is a thin line under the phrase's eight dots, top left. Dots 4 and 8, the B bars, are brighter; on the last bar dot 8 blinks when the next phrase brings a change (a new plan, kick shape or section). A new chord comes in big and teal, bouncing big, small, big, small, and settles white.

• Each layer's page shows that layer alone: the ripples are its own notes, in its colour (the stabs, the pings with their loops' dots, a ring a bass note, a ring a drum hit), and the scope and the spectrum its own sound; the Noise page shows the noise's spectrum. The lanes below show the layer's own in colour and the others in grey. Dub, PERFORM and the other pages show the whole piece.

• Ripples drawn from the sound: each ring's outline is the wave as it sounded when the note was struck (a soft pad a smooth ring, a bright stab a jagged one), and the echo's repeats are measured from what the echo really puts out, so a filtered, ducked or dropped echo shows as it sounds. Under it all, the noise: a grey speck for each of its hits and clicks you can hear, a brighter one for a strong hit.

• What a knob does, on screen: while you turn a knob, the line above the knobs says what it does ("HOW LONG THE REPEATS GO ON"); the rule comes back a moment after.

• Lighter on the CPU: the plate at half the rate (it sounds the same, and frees memory), the noise a third cheaper, the master's soft clip cheaper, the stabs stop working once they're inaudible; and a safety valve: when a moment runs heavy (past 75%), DUB-1 sheds for half a second what is least heard (the quietest tails, the cloud's and the noise's new grains and hits, the width), so a crowded moment doesn't break up.

• The help cards are gone (a held button now nudges, and the firmware is a little smaller); the manual has it all. The cards now say what a long press did.

Fixed

• Holding REC for the effects grid on the Chords or the Pattern page flickered between the grid and the page.
• The grid's Crash was white noise 15 dB over the music: now a darker burst, eased in, at about the music's own level. The Siren and the Riser are 4 dB down (they stood 6 dB over the music).

Upgrading

A piece you never changed takes its new recipe, so it sounds as 1.3.0 tunes it (DUB-1 recognises it against that piece's recipes since 1.0.0, and its scale). A piece you changed keeps its settings (the save format is now 17; older projects are converted). Its values that are new come from the piece's recipe: Throws, the pings' Wet and Hats as the pieces have them, the bass's Density, the chord's Wet, the kick's Density, the echo's Blur, Tone and Width, the noise's Decay, Width, Plate, Echo and LFO, the hats' length. The one-sided knobs (the chord's Attack, the pings' Bend, the FM pages' Feedback) keep a value you set where it fits, a negative one becoming 0; a Mod dec you set comes back as the LFO's depth (a negative one as 0). Duck keeps its value, on PERFORM now. Your Feedback keeps its number, now read as the tail's length, and the noise keeps its level and its knobs (Colour now Tone, Grain now Density, Room now Air). To hear a changed piece as 1.3.0 tunes it (the new noise level, the shorter tails, the recalibrated stabs and kick), hold GLO on for 1.5 s on that piece: it goes back to its new recipe (save to keep it). A piece with chords you wrote keeps them; its empty slots become gaps. A piece with no chords written starts with eight from the walk. "Random" is now the walk on Wander, and "Prog" is Loop.

Installing

Use the web installer above, or download dub-1.3.0.fwsc below and run python3 tools/fm1_install.py dub-1.3.0.fwsc from a checkout of the source. To go back, use the installer's "Back to the stock firmware", or M-VAVE's M-UPGRADE. Installing other firmware is at your own risk; an FM-1 that fails to start twice comes up in a safe mode the installer can reach.

Credits

A fork of AMB-1 by Charles Vestal. The granular cloud follows JIANT's CLOUD. The noise machine follows Bahadirhan Kocer's "Using Resonators in Live". The platform is Felucca by Leo Kuroshita (Hügelton Instruments), by way of X0X, FoMni-1 and AMB-1. GPL-3.0-only. M-VAVE and FM-1 are trademarks of their owners; DUB-1 is not affiliated with M-VAVE or Hügelton Instruments.