FM-1 Easy Guide

A plain-words beginner's guide to the M-VAVE FM-1 pocket FM synthesizer — built because the official manual is genuinely hard to read, and it predates the V15 firmware that changed how the sequencer works.

The guide breaks the whole machine into one-page, follow-along lessons: every button in plain English, first sounds, your first recorded loop, and simple beats drawn as step grids. No music knowledge needed.

Get it

• Interactive follow-along demo (click the panel, hear real sound): https://fm1-demo.pingywon.workers.dev
• Project page: https://pingywon.github.io/fm1-easy-guide/
• SLOOP firmware tutorial (for FM-1s running the free SLOOP groovebox firmware): https://fm1-demo.pingywon.workers.dev/sloop/
• The guide (PDF, 33 pages, prints fine in black & white): FM-1-Easy-Guide.pdf

What's inside the PDF

• Part 1 · Meet the box — a numbered map of the panel, every control in one line, the music words, and all 128 factory sounds by name (the drums live in 099–127).
• Part 2 · Ten lessons — one page each: first sounds, octaves, ENV, LFO, effects, the arpeggiator, recording a loop, fixing mistakes, saving, building your own sound, plugging things in.
• Part 3 · Beats — how a beat works, turning a preset into a drum hit, then four beats step by step.
• Help — "it's doing something weird" fixes, firmware-version notes, a cheat sheet and a log page.

The SLOOP tutorial

SLOOP by 3dSam (GPL-3.0, based on Felucca by Leo Kuroshita / Hügelton Instruments) is free replacement firmware that turns the FM-1 into a 4-track groovebox. The SLOOP tutorial (demo/src/sloop.html) teaches it on a clickable panel: six follow-along lessons (tracks, a step-recorded drum loop, live-recorded bass, one-finger chords, mixing and punch-in effects, song mode) and four ready-made grooves (lo-fi, boom-bap, house, acid) with build-it-yourself steps for the real device.

It is this project's own code: the sounds are lookalikes made with the browser's Web Audio, not SLOOP's engines, and nothing from the SLOOP repository is copied. Unofficial; not made by the SLOOP authors or M-VAVE.

Build it yourself

Needs Python 3, Chromium and poppler-utils (pdftotext, pdftoppm).

python3 build.py              # renders FM-1-Easy-Guide.pdf from parts/*.html
python3 tools/build_site.py   # the project page in docs/
python3 tools/build_demo.py   # both demos into demo/site/ (bash demo/publish.sh deploy publishes them)

Pages are plain HTML in parts/, styled by fm1.css. Diagrams (the panel, keyboards, beat grids) are generated by macros in build.py, so they always match the text. The table of contents page numbers fill themselves in on a second render pass.

The current version lives in VERSION and is stamped onto the cover, every page footer, the project page and the demo.

Honesty notes

• Unofficial. Not made by or affiliated with M-VAVE. "M-VAVE", "FM-1", "DX7" and "Dexed" are names of their owners.
• Written against firmware V15 (July 2026). Where sources disagreed with the printed manual, the guide says "trust the screen."
• The knob amounts are starting points worked out from the manual, M-VAVE's own update videos and owner forums — your ears are the judge.

Licences

Code and guide text: MIT. Bundled fonts (Atkinson Hyperlegible, Fredoka): SIL Open Font License 1.1.