// THE VERGE — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
Vibe coding is turning the music gear world upside down
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LLMs have led to an explosion of custom firmware and hacks for synths, samplers, and grooveboxes.
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If you spend any time on r/synthesizers or watch a lot of synth videos on YouTube, you’ve probably noticed the explosion of custom firmware for hardware synthesizers, samplers, and grooveboxes. What unites almost all of them is that they were made possible by increasingly sophisticated vibe coding tools.
These sorts of custom firmware were exceedingly rare in the pre-LLM days, and required both deep expertise and an incredible investment of time. It could take weeks or months to add a simple feature like velocity sensitivity to a Korg Volca. Now, hobbyist hackers are able to turn Temu synths into full-fledged grooveboxes in a matter of days.
Elektron’s budget-friendly Model:Cycles, Digitone, Octatrack, and Digitakt have all gained new capabilities with Claude’s help. 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 even Zoom’s 14-year-old Multistomp pedal line have all seen new custom firmware released in the last month or so.
Leading the charge is a tiny $70 Yamaha DX-7 clone: the M-Vave FM-1. It was already on its way to being the synth of the summer. The dirt-cheap price and faithful recreation of classic FM tones made it incredibly popular with first-time synth buyers, hobbyists, and synthfluencers alike. Inevitably, someone wondered how far they could push the hardware and, with the help of AI, kickstarted an arms race.