Manual

IND-1 turns the M-VAVE FM-1 into a self-playing industrial machine, after the late-80s and 90s 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, out of distorted drums, a sequenced bass, two guitars, FM stabs, metal and noise. 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, make it yours: lock the song and write it, step by step, the drums, the bass, the guitars, the synth, the metal, the sections. On the screen the song is a quest through a dark keep, on an LCD of the old handheld kind: a wanderer at the gate, in the halls, up the stair, in battle, at a campfire, against the Warden, out into the dawn.

1Install

Try it first: the browser emulator runs the same code with sound, played with the mouse, a touch screen or the keyboard.

Install from the browser: open the web installer in Chrome or Edge, connect the FM-1 with a USB data cable and press Install. Don't unplug it while it's writing; when it finishes, the FM-1 restarts into IND-1.

Install from the command line: download ind-X.Y.Z.fwsc from the latest release, install Python 3 with pip3 install mido python-rtmidi, and from the IND-1 source run:

python3 tools/fm1_install.py ind-X.Y.Z.fwsc

Go back: "Back to the stock firmware", at the bottom of the installer page, puts M-VAVE's firmware back (download the FM-1 V15 file from the link there, choose it, press the button). M-VAVE's own updater, M-UPGRADE, works too.

Coming from another FM-1 firmware: IND-1 keeps its settings where AMB-1, X0X, LCD-4 and others built on Felucca keep theirs, and its songs where LCD-4 keeps its first eight patterns, each under its own name. None reads another's: installing IND-1 starts it from its recipes, and its first save replaces what the other had saved there. Coming from IND-1 0.1: your pieces' settings carry over; the songs start on auto.

2Getting started

IND-1 starts as soon as it's on. A few minutes with it:

1. Listen. The first piece, Foundry, starts with an intro: hats and metal over a drone, the bass filter opening. After eight bars the verse kicks in: four on the floor, a galloping bass. Turn MASTER for the volume.
2. Move the root. Press a key. Its note blinks on the screen and on the keys; on the next bar the whole machine (bass, guitars, synth, drone) moves there.
3. Throw in a fill. Press OCT−: the rest of the bar is a drum fill.
4. Break it down. Press REC: at the next bar, a breakdown (tribal toms, a long dark chord, the drone up). Press REC again: a build (a snare roll, the filters and a riser climbing). Again, or wait: the drop.
5. Move on. Press EDIT: the next section of the song, after a fill.
6. Mute a layer. Hold EDIT and press ENV: the guitars drop out. Again: they're back.
7. New riffs. Press OCT+: from the next bar, new bass lines, riffs and stabs.
8. Try another piece. Turn PRESETS. Each of the eight pieces has its own groove, tempo, key, mode and sound.
9. Write a drum. Press SEQ (the Drums page), then SEQ again: the drums editor, the steps of the part playing. The first black key is the kick (each black key a drum, heard as you press it). Press a white key: a kick on that step, from the next time round. Press it again: gone. The song is now LOCKED (top of the screen): from here on the machine changes nothing in it by itself.
10. Write a bass line. Press LFO: the bass editor. A black key picks a note (the first is the root, then up the mode to the octave; the last three go below the root); a white key puts it on a step.
11. Lay out the song. Press HOME, then HOME again: the song editor, a section on each white key. Turn KNOB 1 for its kind (a verse, a chorus...), KNOB 2 for its length; the black keys turn its layers on and off. A white key past the last section adds one.
12. Let the machine have it back. In the song editor, turn KNOB 4 to Auto: it writes on from there. Or hold SAVE for 1.5 s: the piece back to its recipe, and a new song.
13. Stop. Press PLAY: the machine stops, the tails ring out. PLAY again and it picks up where it was.

What you change is kept with the piece, your songs too. IND-1 saves by itself while stopped, or press SAVE.

Not sure what a button does? Hold it for a second: a card says. Let go and nothing happens.

3Controls

The drawing at the top shows them all; here they are in more detail.

Help: hold any button but PLAY for a second and a card says what it does. A key, a knob or another button puts the card away; letting go after it does nothing else.

4The screen

The top of the screen is a dark LCD: near-black glass, ember segments, and behind every segment its ghost, as on the old handheld games. Under it, on the case, the layers and the knobs.

• The top line: the piece; AUTO (the machine writes its song) or LOCK (the song is yours); the root sounding and the mode (while a new root waits for the bar, it blinks after an arrow). On the right, the tempo in segments (EXT when it follows MIDI clock), a beat light (a square while stopped) and a dot when there are unsaved changes. Messages ("ROOT A", "FILL", "LOCKED") show here for a moment.
• The section: its name, the bar of it ("3/16", or LOOP), the place it is in the quest, and on the right the chord's root, or what waits for the bar ("> BREAKDOWN", "> NEXT", "> MUTATE"), blinking.
• The song: under it, a strip of blocks, one per section, as long as it lasts. The one playing fills as it goes. A section reached by a button plays outside the plan: a line marks where the song picks up after it.
• The quest: each section is a place, and the layers move the wanderer:

| Section | Place | | |---|---|---| | Intro | The gate | The portcullis rises as the intro goes on; the kick shakes dust from it. | | Verse | The halls | The banners and the flagstones go by, a step a bass note. | | Build | The stair | Up the tower, a landing at a time, to a beacon that grows with the build. | | Chorus | The battle | Skeletons come on with the kick, and fall to it. A war banner flies with the guitars. | | Breakdown | The campfire | The drums stoke the fire; the stars twinkle with the synth. | | Drop | The Warden | An iron giant with a furnace for a heart: it flares with the kick; its strength falls through the drop. | | Outro | The dawn | Out into the morning, the sun rising. |

Everywhere: the kick swings the sword, the snare raises it; the bass walks; the guitar flares the torches; the synth circles magic over the wanderer's head; the metal strikes sparks off the blade; the noise is the mist along the ground.

• The steps: under the scene, the sixteen steps of the bar, one under each white key: the page's layer (the drums on the Machine, Space and Setup pages: the kick, with a mark under a step for the snare and the hats). Taller is an accent; the playhead runs underneath. In an editor, what the editor writes.
• The layers: on the case, the six layers (drums, bass, guitar, synth, metal, noise), each with a meter: lit for the page's, white playing, grey resting this section, red muted.
• The knobs: the page's name (or the editor's, or STEP 5 while a step is held), eight dots, one a page, then four values, one for each knob: a dial (or, for a switch, its positions) and the value. The one you're turning lights up.

5The machine

IND-1 plays six layers from one root and one mode.

• Drums: a 909-ish kick with its own drive, a snare (or, for EBM and Stomp, a clap), closed and open hats and a crash, toms for the fills and the breakdowns. Six grooves: EBM's four on the floor, a rock beat, a sampled break, half time, thrash (machine-gun kicks), a stomp. The drums run through a crusher, fewer bits and a lower sample rate, the crunch of an EMAX or an SP-12 pitched down. The snare's reverb is gated.
• Bass: a mono synth after the Pro-1 and the Minimoog: a saw and a square a few cents apart, a sine an octave down, through a resonant low-pass with its own envelope, then driven. It plays sixteenths, gallops, octaves (EBM's bounce), the b2 and the fifth, with accents and the odd slide.
• Guitar: two synthesized guitars, left and right, as a double-tracked rhythm part: power chords through a high-gain amp and a cabinet. Palm-muted chugs in the verses, open chords ringing over chugs in the choruses. They're synthesized, not sampled: think of them as an industrial guitar machine.
• Synth: stabs and short lines in the spirit of the Oberheim Xpander and the Prophet VS on Pretty Hate Machine: a saw crossfading into gritty FM (Tone), each note sweeping from a bright attack to its body. Stabs are chords on the scale; in a chorus, with Busy up, a line.
• Metal: inharmonic FM clangs (an anvil, scrap) and struck-sheet noise on two Euclidean patterns: one of 16 steps, one of 12, 9, 7 or 5 that slides across the bars (polyrhythm).
• Noise: a bed under it all: a drone (the root, beating against itself, and the tritone) or static (wandering filtered noise and crackle). Up in the intro and the breakdown, down under a chorus. Into a drop, a riser.

Then the space: a ping-pong delay (a dotted eighth, each repeat darker), Dattorro's plate behind a gate the snare opens, and Pump: each kick ducks everything else for a moment.

6The songs

Each piece plays a song. Its material is in three parts, each a bar of every layer with four chords:

• A: the verse, and also the intro, the build and the outro (each treats it its own way);
• B: the chorus, and the drop;
• C: the breakdown.

Then the plan: the sections in order, each with its length and the layers that play in it, and the metal's two rings.

On auto (as it starts) the machine writes all of it, and rewrites it as it goes. Its songs run

The bracketed sections come in some songs and not others. After the outro a new song starts, from new material (with Evolve at 0, the same song again).

Locked, nothing changes by itself: no new songs, no evolving, and every fill falls the same way every time round. The song plays its plan, then again from the top. Any edit locks the song (see Your songs); KNOB 4 in the song editor turns it back to auto.

• Each section has its layers. On auto the machine deals them: the intro and the breakdown lean on the noise, the metal and the synth; verses on the drums and the bass (the guitars mostly wait for the chorus); choruses and drops bring everything in. Intensity leans every section fuller or sparser; at 100, every layer plays every chorus and drop. Locked, the layers are the plan's, as you set them, and Intensity leaves them be. A layer you turn up from 0 joins the section at once.
• The intro starts with hats and metal over the drone, the filters closed; the kick joins halfway as they open. The build rolls the snare (quarters, eighths, sixteenths, then 32nds), pulses the bass, opens the filters and raises a riser. The drop (and a chorus after a build) lands with a crash and a deep boom. The breakdown is tribal toms over a lone kick, a long dark chord and the drone.
• Fills: the last bar of a section fills (snare runs, tom runs, kick and snare together, or a stop: one hit, then silence until the next section). Now and then a phrase ends with a short fill.
• Chords: verses mostly hold the root; choruses move (to the bVI and bVII, the b2, the iv), a quarter of the section a chord.
• Evolve: on auto, every four bars, with Evolve up, something changes: a bass note moves, a chug becomes an accent, the stabs turn, the metal shifts; ghost kicks and snares come and go. Locked, Evolve only sets how often a phrase ends with a fill.

Arrange sets the sections' lengths (all of them on auto; locked, the sections you left at "Arrange"):

With Loop, a verse, chorus, breakdown or drop holds until you move on: EDIT for the next section, REC for the breakdown, the build and the drop.

7Your songs: the editors

Each page with a layer has an editor: press its button again (HOME again for the song). Press it once more to go back to the page; from one editor, another layer's button goes straight to its editor.

Any edit locks the song. LOCKED shows for a moment, and the top line says LOCK. From then on the machine changes nothing in it by itself; the buttons still do what you ask: OCT− a fill, REC the breakdown, EDIT the next section, OCT+ new lines for the part playing. To give the song back to the machine, turn KNOB 4 in the song editor to Auto, or hold SAVE for 1.5 s (the piece's recipe, and a new song).

The keys in an editor: the sixteen white keys are the sixteen steps of a bar (in the song editor, its sixteen sections); the black keys pick a drum, a note or a layer. The keys light up where there are notes, and the playhead blinks along them. Everywhere:

An edit is heard from the next time the step comes round. The editors open on the part playing; the playhead shows only while that part plays (to hear part B, play a chorus: EDIT moves on, and Arrange Loop holds a section while you work on it).

The song (HOME, HOME)

The sections, one on each white key, as the quest's places, with their lengths (dim: as Arrange makes it). The one picked is outlined; the one playing glows.

• A white key: picks that section. The key after the last adds a section, a copy of the last.
• EDIT + a white key: that section goes. ENV + a white key: a copy of it, after it.
• The black keys: the first six turn the picked section's layers on and off: drums, bass, guitar, synth, metal, noise (the letters under the sections show them).
• KNOB 1, Section: its kind (intro, verse, build, chorus, breakdown, drop, outro); a new kind brings its usual layers. KNOB 2, Bars: its length, 1 to 32, or Arrange. KNOB 3, Bed: the noise layer's bed in it: as Texture says, the drone, static, or both. KNOB 4, Song: auto or locked.

SELECT turns to the chords of part A, B and C: four chords a part, each a quarter of the section (a bar each in a four-bar section), on KNOB 1–4, named by their root note in the mode. The build always holds the root.

The drums (SEQ, SEQ)

Eight rows, a drum each, on the first eight black keys: kick, snare, closed hat, open hat, crash, high, mid and low tom. The one picked is named; a black key also plays its drum. A step holds one hat (closed, open or the crash) and one tom: a new one takes its place. ENV + a step goes accent, ghost, plain hit.

The sections still treat the drums their way: the intro keeps the hats and brings the kick in halfway; the build rolls the snare instead; a chorus or a drop lands with a crash; the last bar of a section fills; the outro thins out. The breakdown plays part C as it is.

Groove (KNOB 2 on the Drums page) writes the verse's and the chorus's drums anew from its patterns, so it's a place to start from (on auto it writes the bass and the riffs too).

The bass, the guitar, the synth (LFO, ENV, ARP: twice)

Eleven rows, a note each, on the black keys: the root, then up the mode to the octave (eight keys), then the three below the root. The rows are named on the left by the note picked, from the root and the mode; over the chords, the notes move with them (a note is a step of the scale above the bar's chord).

Held, a step's knobs:

On the screen: an accent is white-hot, a chug short, an open chord tall; a tail is a held note, a stub on the left a slide, a dot above an octave up or a line. Riff (the Guitar page) and Busy (the Synth page) write their parts anew, as Groove does the drums.

The metal (SEL, SEL)

The metal plays two Euclidean rings: the anvil and the scrap. Each spreads its hits as evenly as it can over its steps, and turns on its own length across the bars: a ring of 7 against the bar's 16 is a polyrhythm. SELECT picks the ring; Hits, Steps (1–16) and Turn (where it starts) are its own, Tone the clangs' pitches. Hits on the Metal page sets both rings' hits at once.

8The pieces

PRESETS chooses one of eight pieces. Each is a recipe for the whole machine: the groove, the sounds, tempo, key and mode, how busy it is. Each remembers how you left it, and its song: a locked one comes back as you left it, one on auto starts anew. Hold SAVE for 1.5 s to put the piece you're on back to its recipe (and its song to auto). Tune, MIDI out and Lights are the same for all.

9The pages

One page a layer, each on its own button, with four values on KNOB 1–4. SELECT steps through them in this order. Pressed again, the button opens the page's editor (Your songs).

HOME: Machine

• Tempo: 60 to 180 (also HOME + SELECT, from any page).
• Arrange: Loop, Long, Normal or Short (see The songs); locked, for the sections left at Arrange.
• Evolve: how much changes as it plays. At 0 the riffs and patterns repeat exactly and every song is the same song; turned up, things change every few bars, fills come more often, and each song has new material.
• Intensity: how many layers play each section, from sparse to everything.

SEQ: Drums

• Level.
• Groove: EBM, Rock, Break, Half (time), Thrash, Stomp. Changing it writes the verse's and the chorus's drums anew from the next bar (on auto the bass and the riffs too, as they're written for the groove).
• Crush: from clean to 6 bits at a few kHz.
• Kick: its drive and length, from a tight knock to a distorted boom.

LFO: Bass

• Level.
• Cutoff: the low-pass, 55 Hz to 2.5 kHz (before the envelope).
• Squelch: how far the envelope opens the filter, how long it takes to close, and the resonance.
• Drive.

ENV: Guitar

• Level.
• Gain: how hard the amp is driven, from crunch to a wall.
• Chug: the palm mute, from open and ringing to a tight chug.
• Riff: how busy the riffs are, from a chug a beat to sixteenths. A change writes them again from the next bar.

ARP: Synth

• Level.
• Tone: a saw (0), gritty FM (around 50), a metallic clang (100).
• Decay: short stabs to long chords.
• Busy: how many stabs, and how often a chorus gets a line. A change writes them again from the next bar.

SEL: Metal

• Metal: the clangs' level.
• Hits: how many, on both rings (each ring's own in the metal editor).
• Noise: the bed's level (the drone or the static, and the risers).
• Texture: from the drone (0) to static (100), where a section's bed is left to it (the song editor's Bed).

FX: Space

• Reverb: how much goes to the plate.
• Gate: how hard the snare's gate shuts the reverb (0: it rings free). A section without a snare leaves the gate open.
• Delay: how much goes to the ping-pong delay, a dotted eighth.
• Pump: how much each kick ducks everything else.

GLO: Setup

• Root: the root, as the keys set it.
• Tune: fine tuning, ±50 cents.
• MIDI out: on or off.
• Lights: On: the keys light the root, and the unlit buttons glow dimly so they can be read on the black FM-1. Keys: the key lights only. Off.

The top right of this page shows how much of the FM-1's time the sound takes (CPU).

10MIDI

MIDI comes in over USB and the TRS jack, and goes out over USB.

• In, channel 1: a note moves the root, like a key.
• In, clock: the grid follows MIDI clock, and start / stop start and stop the machine (start: from the top of the song). The screen shows EXT for the tempo. From a Mac too (macOS sends them another way, and IND-1 takes either).
• Out (on by default): the synth on channel 1, the bass on 2, the guitars on 3 (the chord's root), the drums and the metal on 10 (General MIDI: kick 36, snare 38, clap 39, closed hat 42, open hat 46, crash 49, toms 48, 45 and 43, the anvil 56, scrap 54); and clock with start / stop when IND-1 runs on its own tempo. Turning MIDI out off sends all notes off.

11Saving

IND-1 keeps all eight pieces in the FM-1's memory, each as you left it: every value, the root and the mode, its song (a locked one, note for note; one on auto is written anew when you come back to it), plus Tune, MIDI out and Lights.

• By itself: a few seconds after a change, but only while stopped. Writing to the memory interrupts the sound for a moment, so it never happens while the machine runs. A dot at the top of the screen means there are unsaved changes.
• SAVE: saves now, running or not.
• Hold SAVE for 1.5 s: the piece goes back to its recipe, its song to auto. That isn't saved until the next save, so switching off before then brings your version back.

Mutes aren't saved: they're for playing.

12Troubleshooting

Update mode: hold OCT− and OCT+ together for five seconds. A countdown appears; let go before it ends to cancel (no fill and no mutate happen).

Calibration: if a button or knob does the wrong thing, hold OCT− and OCT+ while you switch the FM-1 on. The screen then asks you to press each button and turn each knob in turn.

Clicks or dropouts: the Setup page shows how much of the FM-1's time the sound takes. The busiest settings (every layer in, long synth chords, Busy and Hits up, at a fast tempo) cost the most; turning a layer you don't need to 0 saves its share.

After a crash: IND-1 shows a red CRASH screen and restarts by itself a few seconds later. The next start shows RESTARTED AFTER A CRASH and an address (PC ...) for a moment. If you report the problem, include that address and what you were doing.

Safe mode: if IND-1 crashes twice in a row while starting, it starts in SAFE MODE instead. There's no sound, but USB works, so the web installer can reach it: reinstall IND-1, or put the stock firmware back from the same page. Press PLAY to try starting IND-1 normally again. If even safe mode fails twice, the FM-1 drops into the chip's own update mode, and only the rescue below can reach it.

Recovering an FM-1 that won't start

An FM-1 in the chip's own update mode shows a blank screen, and neither the web installer nor M-VAVE's updater can see it. A script in the IND-1 source puts M-VAVE's firmware back, on a Mac, with the USB cable you already have. In Terminal, from the IND-1 folder:

bash tools/fm1_rescue.sh

1. If a window asks to install the command line developer tools, click Install. When it has finished, run the line again.
2. If it asks for a password, type your Mac password (nothing shows as you type) and press Return.
3. When it says it's waiting, plug the FM-1 in and switch it on. The script catches it, checks the chip, saves a backup of the FM-1's memory in the fm1-rescue folder in your home folder, and asks before it writes anything.
4. Type yes and press Return. Don't unplug anything until it says it's restarting the FM-1. The FM-1 then starts into its original firmware, and you can install IND-1 again from there.

The script downloads M-VAVE's FM-1 V15 firmware and JieLi's flash loader, and checks both against known fingerprints. It writes only the firmware area of the memory, never the bootloader or the FM-1's own settings, and checks everything it writes. Running it again is always safe. If the FM-1 never shows up at all, Felucca's FM-1-transporter (a small RP2040 board wired to the USB lines) can still reach it.

13Parameters

The defaults are Foundry's; each piece has its own.

The editors' values:

14Credits

IND-1 is free software under the GNU General Public License, version 3. If you share the firmware, you must also share its source code.

• The sound is after the records of KMFDM, Nine Inch Nails and Ministry, and the instruments on them: the Oberheim Xpander, the Sequential Prophet VS and Pro-1, the Minimoog, the E-mu Emulator and EMAX, the Fairlight, the Akai samplers, the Roland TR-909.
• IND-1 is built on AMB-1 by Charles Vestal: its engine's frame, the screen and knob code, the simulator and the browser emulator.
• The reverb is Jon Dattorro's plate ("Effect Design, Part 1", JAES 1997), by way of FoMni-1 and AMB-1.
• The Euclidean rhythms are Godfried Toussaint's reading of Bjorklund's algorithm.
• The platform (hardware layer, USB, update loader, installer and storage) is from Felucca by Leo Kuroshita, Hügelton Instruments, by way of X0X and AMB-1.
• The idea of running FM-1 firmware in the browser comes from Groove OS.
• The screen is after the old handheld LCD games: segments and their ghosts. Its places, the wanderer, the skeletons and the Warden are IND-1's own.
• The fonts are Barlow Semi Condensed and Terminus (SIL Open Font License).

M-VAVE and FM-1 are trademarks of their owners. IND-1 is not connected with M-VAVE, KMFDM, Nine Inch Nails, Ministry or Hügelton Instruments.