IND-1

An industrial machine for the M-VAVE FM-1

A self-playing industrial machine, after the records of KMFDM, Nine Inch Nails and Ministry. It starts the moment it's switched on and arranges its own songs: intros, verses, builds, choruses, breakdowns and drops. You steer it: press a key and the whole machine moves to that root on the next bar; throw in fills, breakdowns and drops, mute layers, mutate the riffs. And when you like what it plays, lock the song and write it yourself, step by step.

IND-1's screen: a verse of Foundry, the wanderer walking through the halls under banners and torches, the bar's kicks below

IND-1's screen: the drop, the wanderer facing the Warden, an iron giant with a furnace for a heart

IND-1's screen: the song editor, ten sections as the quest's places, the chorus picked with its layers

The machine

Drums. A distorted kick, a snare or a clap through a gated plate, hats, toms for the fills; six grooves from EBM's four on the floor to thrash, through a crusher for the sampler's crunch.
Bass. A Pro-1-style mono synth: a saw and a square through a squelching low-pass, driven, in sixteenths, gallops and octaves.
Guitar. Two synthesized guitars, left and right: palm-muted chugs and open power chords through a high-gain amp and a cabinet.
Synth. FM and saw stabs and lines in the spirit of the Xpander and the Prophet VS.
Metal and noise. Inharmonic clangs on two Euclidean rings; a drone or static under the intros and breakdowns, risers into the drops.

Eight pieces, from four-on-the-floor EBM to thrash and half-time grind, each remembering how you left it.

Your songs

Each piece's song is three parts (the verse, the chorus, the breakdown), each a bar of every layer with its chords, and a plan of sections. Press a page's button again for its editor: the white keys are the steps, the black keys the drums or the mode's notes; the song editor lays out the sections, their lengths and the layers in each. Any edit locks the song: from then on the machine changes nothing in it by itself, and it plays the same way every time. Turn it back to auto and the machine writes on.

The quest

The screen is a dark LCD of the old handheld kind, every segment's ghost behind it. The song is a journey through a keep: the gate, the halls, the stair, the battle, the campfire, the Warden, the dawn. The drums swing the wanderer's sword, the bass walks, the guitars flare the torches, the synth circles magic, the metal strikes sparks, the noise rolls in as mist.

To go back to the official firmware, use the installer's "Back to the stock firmware", or M-VAVE's updater, M-UPGRADE, from m-vave.com/download. M-VAVE and FM-1 are trademarks of their owners. IND-1 is not affiliated with M-VAVE, KMFDM, Nine Inch Nails or Ministry; its scenes and characters are its own.