Hortator is custom firmware by DEADACTIVE, named after the drummer who kept a Roman galley's rowers in time. Keep scrolling and the machine is yours to play: the real firmware, running in your browser.
No menus to dig through: every feature has its button, and the screen shows it at work. These are the firmware's own screens, recorded from the same build you can play above.
Each track plays its own drum model and pattern. TRACKS shows all eight at once: level, length and pan, with mutes that can wait for the next bar so a drop lands on the one.
REC opens TRACKS; ALGORITHM picks a track anywhere.
808 and 909 kicks, snares and claps, hats, toms, cowbell, cymbal, rim, clave, conga and Plaits-style voices. Every model has TUNE, DECAY, TONE and a fourth knob of its own.
EDIT, then the four knobs.
Up to 64 steps per track on the 16 white keys, each track with its own length. Accents, swing, PROB and RATCH per step, fills that play every other bar, and live recording.
SEQ; the white keys are the steps.
Mutable Instruments' pattern generator. Move through its map of drum patterns, add chaos, or switch to Euclidean rhythms; any track can follow one of its three channels.
ARP.
The Streams compressor, keyed by any track: duck the hats and the reverb under the kick. GHOST keeps the pump going even with the key track muted.
HOME, then PRESETS to the COMP pages.
Two LFOs per track, ten waves with a morph between them, synced to the tempo, each on its own destination: pitch, decay, tone, level, pan and more.
LFO; press it again for the second one.
Distortion, the SLICER and RESON (string, pipe or chord) on every track; delay, ROOM or SPRING reverb and chorus sends; a master limiter, and BASS+ for the small speaker.
FX, PRESETS turns the pages.
It installs from a web page over the FM-1's own USB cable, in a few minutes. Nothing to download, no extra hardware.
On a computer: the installer talks to the FM-1 over USB MIDI, which only these browsers allow.
With a USB data cable, straight into the computer. No probe or Transporter.
Keep the cable in until it says Done. The FM-1 restarts with Hortator.
Hortator
Hortator is beta firmware and may be unstable. You install it at your own risk: the author accepts no responsibility if your FM-1 is damaged or misbehaves.
M-VAVE's own updater, M-UPGRADE, puts the official firmware back: from m-vave.com/download, Downloads → PC Software → M-UPGRADE, with PC Firmware → FM-1 V15.
Replug the cable and press Install again: the FM-1 stays in update mode until a write has finished. If it no longer starts at all, recovering it needs a Transporter.