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FirmwareM-VAVE FM-1

Arctic Scream

PolarPatch/Arctic-scream-FM-1 · ★ 4

Dark ambient drone firmware by PolarPatch, inspired by GR!MM, with Howl, a feedback-loop voice inspired by the Synthux Audrey II, a self-evolving DRONE mode and a 64-step sequencer.

README from GitHub, GPL-3.0

Árktalaš holvvas // Arctic Scream

Dark ambient drones and feedback screams from the arctic tundra, for the M-VAVE FM-1.

Wind over the frozen tundra. Ice that groans under its own weight. Something out there in the polar night, howling back. Arctic Scream turns the FM-1 into an instrument for that: slow, cold drones that hum for minutes, and a voice that wakes on its own and screams.

The Arctic Scream demo: the FM-1's panel in the browser, ICE WRAITH playing

Buy PolarPatch a coffee

Arctic Scream p0larpatch is a drone firmware for the FM-1 by PolarPatch. It has four tracks, long dark effects, a 64-step sequencer, chords, an arpeggiator and song mode, and comes with its own feedback voice, an arctic sound, a new look and its own editor.

▶ Watch the Arctic Scream demo on YouTube: Holvut, DRONE, the effects and the sequencer, played by the firmware itself.

▶ Review: Arctic Scream Test by CCJmusic.

Try it in your browser first: the demo runs the same code as the instrument, so you can play it before you install it. Then open the editor and the cheat sheet.

Free and open source (GPL-3.0). Unofficial firmware, not made or endorsed by M-VAVE. Install at your own risk.

What's new

  • Howl/Holvut, a feedback-loop sound source. (Holvut is North Sami for to howl.) It is inspired by the Synthux Audrey II and written from scratch for the FM-1. A string and a resonant body sit inside a loop with saturation, filters and diffusion.
    • Below the threshold the loop sleeps. Past it, the loop wakes and grows out of silence into a howl that sustains itself.
    • Each key press sends a short burst into the loop, so a note played near the threshold sets it off.
    • FEEDBACK wakes it, BODY bends it, DAMP turns the scream into a growl, and DRIVE tears it.
    • New in 1.3: push FEEDBACK to its last steps and the howl overblows: it leaps up the note's overtones and screams higher. Play from a MIDI keyboard with aftertouch and pressing harder does the same: the note feeds back more, screams and climbs, and falls back when you ease off.
    • BODY now reaches ~92 ms, for slow pulses at the top of its range; four all-passes in the loop smear the scream like a small reverb.
  • New in 1.3.1: USB audio on macOS 10.14 to 15. Up to 1.3 those Macs saw the FM-1 but never showed its audio input (MIDI worked); the newest macOS took it. And a computer now records the FM-1 at full level whatever the volume knob says: the knob sets the speaker and the headphones, not the recording.
  • New in 1.3:
    • GENERATE: hold FX and tap a black key, and that track plays by itself, always in its SCALE (in chords with chord mode on), in three moods: DRIFT, PULSE and STORM. It sits beside DRONE: one moves the sound, the other the notes.
    • MASTER and DRIVE: two new FX pages. MASTER is a filter on the whole mix (LP, HP or BP, before the effects, after the reverb or at the very end). DRIVE's AMOUNT tears the whole mix (SOFT, FUZZ, CLIP or FOLD), each type about as loud as the others, a limiter after it.
    • The track filter gets a TYPE (LP, HP, BP) and a POS (PRE or POST the effects) on MIXER 2.
    • MIDI clock in (USB or the TRS jack) and out (USB), MIDI in on the TRS jack with a TRS-to-DIN adapter, and one MIDI channel to the selected track (CH n > SEL).
    • 6 dB of headroom and a safety limiter, so loud screams no longer clip; a drone keeps its voices when another track plays a big chord.
    • WARP and MORPH on HOME (RESONANCE moved to MIXER 2), and bigger FX: TAPE's wow, saturation, tone and hiss reach much further, DELAY's WEAR wobbles and drives harder, and turning GRAIN or DELAY up on a track that sends nothing turns its send on.
    • LATCH from any page (SEL + OCT+), REC held to clear a pattern, backups with your samples, cleaner USB recording (USB REC DROPS on SYSTEM 2), and saves that no longer wait for ever under a delay that feeds back for ever.
  • DRONE, a sound that lives on its own. Press LFO twice. The knobs have North Sami names:
    • BORGA (snowdrift): four slow random walks move the filter, the source's shape and its own most natural knob, and the reverb's distance. Each voice drifts a few cents and breathes, so a held chord sounds like a choir. It never repeats.
    • STOARBMA (storm): the tension. It opens the filter, raises resonance and drive, spreads the voices and makes the walks deeper and faster.
    • GOHCCAT (to wake): 1 to 32 bars for the storm to rise, in tempo. A drone woken from silence starts calm and builds.
    • At 0 % the sound is exactly as set. The settings are saved with the sound, and all seven screaming presets start with BORGA on.
  • Seven screaming presets: POLAR HOWL, WENDIGO, FROZEN SCREAM, WHITEOUT, DEAD SIGNAL, III and ICE WRAITH. ICE WRAITH is the sound you start with, and all seven hold their notes (LATCH). III is a horrorscape: a cluster of three howling voices a semitone apart, dark and slowly waking (how to play it).
  • The HORROR scale: close semitones, so every note is wrong in the right way.
  • Runaway echo: DELAY feedback goes up to 150 %, so the echo can grow and saturate. Delay times go up to 3 seconds.
  • Built for drones:
    • The keys sit an octave down, starting at F2.
    • The track defaults are darker.
    • The knobs on HOME, EDIT and LFO all audibly change the sound from the start.
    • HOME's knobs set the selected track's VOLUME and CUTOFF, and two that twist it: WARP (eight layers of motion, from a still sound to a wild one, smoothly) and MORPH (one knob through all four of the source's knobs at once, never quite still).
  • 47 factory sounds with arctic names, such as POLAR NIGHT, PERMAFROST, SVALBARD CELLO and NORTHERN LIGHT.
  • A new look:
    • an arctic cyberpunk palette from PolarPatch's BlueWatch;
    • waveforms that glow on HOME;
    • aurora ribbons that move with Holvut's knobs and with DRONE's walks;
    • moving northern lights on the FX, LFO and mixer pages too: TAPE's four ribbons, GRAIN's torn-off grains of light, DELAY's echoes (burning magenta when they run away), SPACE's hanging curtain, the LFO's band, and the mixers' curtains and crests;
    • at power-on, ARCTIC SCREAM tears itself out of the dark in a glitch storm and settles into the banner's glitch.
  • A one-page cheat sheet with every button, knob and combo, and a guide to summoning the screams.

The editor

The editor runs in Chrome or Edge and talks to the FM-1 live over USB. It also works without an FM-1, with the firmware running inside the page.

  • Sound: every parameter of the four tracks, live as you move it, with the instrument's screen and keys beside it.
  • Sound tools:
    • undo and redo;
    • compare with the sound as you loaded it;
    • store an A and a B sound, then switch or morph between them;
    • randomize by any amount.
  • Sequencer: a step grid, a piano roll or a typed step list, with tempo, play and stop, a playhead, and MIDI files in and out.
  • Library, samples and backup: a sound library with 64 user slots, uploading WAVs into the four sample slots, and full backup and restore.

Install

Download arctic-scream-X.Y.fwsc (the newest) from Releases. Then, with Python 3 and pip install mido python-rtmidi, connect the FM-1 over USB and run:

python3 tools/fm1_install.py arctic-scream-1.3.1.fwsc

Every release is built and signed on GitHub from the tagged source (the FM-1 Firmware Hub's fm1-build); check a file with gh attestation verify arctic-scream-1.3.1.fwsc --repo PolarPatch/Arctic-scream-FM-1 --signer-workflow zvenson/fm1-build/.github/workflows/build.yml.

It installs over the FM-1's own firmware or any other FM-1 firmware. Don't unplug the FM-1 while it writes. If anything goes wrong, the Rescue page on the FM-1 Firmware Hub brings a stuck FM-1 back, and M-VAVE's own updater puts the original firmware back.

Good to know

  • Saves: Arctic Scream keeps its own saves, separate from other FM-1 firmwares. If you come from another one, your projects and slots start empty.
  • Samples: no samples are built in. The four slots are yours to fill from the editor, and samples already on your FM-1 stay.
  • Learn it: every feature in one overview, the manual, the visual manual (PDF) and the cheat sheet.

Credits

  • GR!MM (GPL-3.0): the firmware this is built on, and everything GR!MM itself builds on: Felucca, Dinghy, SLOOP, X0X, msfa, DaisySP, Rings and CrispyZebra. 1.3 brings in much of GR!MM V2.0: GENERATE, MASTER, DRIVE, the track filter's TYPE and POS, the MIDI clock and TRS MIDI IN, the gain staging and its fixes.
  • Audrey II and Audrey Touch by Nick Donaldson (Infrasonic Audio) and Synthux Academy (MIT): the design behind Holvut and the HORROR scale. No code is copied.
  • Jangada by zednaked (GPL-3.0): the idea behind the DRONE page (its EVOL, TENS and RAMP). Written from scratch; no code is copied.
  • BlueWatch by PolarPatch: the colour palette.
  • Press Start 2P font by CodeMan38 and Terminus font by Dimitar Zhekov (SIL Open Font License 1.1).

The PolarPatch logo belongs to PolarPatch and is not under the GPL. See LICENSING.md for the details.

Support

Arctic Scream is free and always will be. If it is useful to you and you would like to say thanks, you can buy PolarPatch a coffee.

Building from source

See docs/BUILDING.md.

Licence

GPL-3.0. See LICENSE. Bugs and questions: open an issue on this repository.