AI coding tools set off a custom-firmware race in music hardware

Among the devices that have gained new firmware in roughly the last month are Elektron's budget Model:Cycles alongside its Digitone, Octatrack and Digitakt, Roland's SP-404 MKII, Ableton's Push 3 and Move, Akai's MPC Live and MPC One as well as the vintage MPC 2000, Novation's Circuit, Arturia's MicroFreak and Zoom's 14-year-old Multistomp pedal line.

Much of the activity centers on the M-Vave FM-1, a $70 clone of the Yamaha DX-7 that had already become popular with first-time synth buyers for its low price and close reproduction of classic FM tones. The device now has dozens of custom firmwares, many of which — including Felucca, Sloop and x0x — list Claude as a contributor on their GitHub pages or carry explicit disclosures about their use of AI. A fourth, Baudgirl, is also suspected of having been built with AI assistance; its developer did not reply to a request for comment from The Verge. What began as a basic DX-7 recreation now supports virtual analog synthesis, sample playback, multi-track sequencing and redesigned interfaces.

Such projects were rare before LLMs became widely available and demanded both deep expertise and large amounts of time. The Verge reported that adding a single feature such as velocity sensitivity to a Korg Volca could once take weeks or months, while developers now describe turning inexpensive hardware into fuller instruments within days.

Roman Rusinov, who posts on Reddit as themanro and releases music as Farlow, targeted the Zoom MS-70CDR, a budget multi-effects pedal from 2012 known for outperforming its price and widely used in low-cost synth setups. He began with ZDL, a project that reverse-engineered the Multistomp format to allow custom effects, and eventually got the pedal to run NAM A2 Lite captures and custom impulse responses, turning it into a modeler that can imitate vintage amps. "I was already using AI for some work stuff and figured this would be a great case to try learning some vibe-coding fundamentals and get a project going," he told The Verge, describing "a lot of trial and error of finding the limitations of the hardware and software." He said he was glad to be part of a wider effort to extend older hardware. "If you own the hardware, you should be able to do whatever you want with it," he said.

18nelli, the developer behind Modded Cycles, said frustration with his Elektron Model:Cycles drove him to modify it. The groovebox has not received an official update since May 2021, and he said it felt designed "just to push us to buy their more expensive gear." He documented the internals of his unit and used Claude Code to build a first hack that added six-track audio over USB. The work has since grown into a community project with mods contributed by others, several standalone firmwares and the ability to convert a Model:Cycles into a Model:Samples. "I think not using LLMs would have been counterproductive," he told The Verge, adding that without them he would have spent most of his time on a single feature rather than making music with the results.

Modded Cycles has been among the busier efforts: The Verge reported watching five firmware updates land in its Discord announcements channel in a single day. 18nelli has said he plans to pause new features and slow development to polish the existing code and fix bugs.

New mods and firmwares are now appearing almost daily, and developers say older or cheaper gear is the most common target, since owners are more willing to risk modifying hardware that is out of warranty or inexpensive to replace.

Editor's Summary

Custom firmware written with the help of large language models has spread quickly across synthesizers, samplers and pedals, with the $70 M-Vave FM-1 and Elektron's Model:Cycles among the most active projects. Developers say the tools cut months of work down to days and have revived hardware that manufacturers no longer update, while several published firmwares openly credit Claude as a contributor.