No talking, no tutorial—just sound, evolving patterns, and a few turns of the knobs.
I built Crown out of a dream to create a musical companion for my guitar jams: something that could suggest ideas, explore different styles, and surprise me with just a handful of controls. Its five Crowns shape different aspects of the music, turning a few simple choices into a wide range of possibilities.
An Arduino Nano handles the knobs, displays, and controls, while a Teensy handles the sequencing, musical logic, and generation of notes and drums. The instrument is still a working prototype, evolving with each experiment.
The visuals come from PHOSPHOR, an audio-reactive app I created specifically for this purpose.
An experimental generative synthesizer that creates melodies, rhythms and textures for spontaneous musical exploration.
Overview
I created Crown out of a dream to build a musical companion for my guitar jams—something I could switch on, explore, and play along with. I wanted to make creating music feel intuitive, with just a few controls to shape the sound and discover different musical styles without getting lost in menus or endless settings. That idea became the five Crowns: five distinct musical personalities, each offering a different starting point for improvisation. Crown brings fresh ideas and unexpected turns to a jam, leaving me free to pick up my guitar and follow wherever the music leads.
The Build
Crown is built around two microcontrollers: an Arduino Nano handles the user interface—knobs, displays, controls, and parameter selection—while a Teensy handles the sequencing, musical logic, and generation of notes and drums. This lets the Teensy focus on making music while the Nano keeps everything hands-on and accessible. A future Sampler Extension, based on the Tsunami Super WAV Trigger, will expand Crown’s sound palette with sampled instruments, atmospheric layers, and other recorded sounds.
The Philosophy and why Crown?
I think of the five Crowns as the guiding forces behind the music. Each one is an abstract control that shapes a whole set of musical decisions, letting me explore different styles and moods with just a few gestures. The name comes from that idea of influence: each Crown rules over part of the musical world, and together they give it its character. My goal was to make something I could play by feel, letting a few meaningful choices open the door to unexpected music.
"In this video, we walk through the complete assembly of a Puremagnetik Etches Kit in about 10 minutes.
We'll cover what's included in the kit, how to attach the components to the circuit boards, how to fasten the boards together, and the final steps to complete your instrument."
"Alecto is a dual-voice analog drum synthesizer combining powerful sound design with polymetric sequencing. Each voice features two oscillators, a noise source, dual filters, and two envelope generators, delivering everything from punchy percussion and deep bass to evolving sonic textures.
Two independent trigger sequencers create complex, ever-shifting rhythmic patterns, while the versatile patchbay and Eurorack compatibility open up endless possibilities for sonic exploration, whether as a standalone instrument or part of a modular system."
"I built a drum sequencer that runs on my car's Android Auto display.
Now I can make beats right from the dashboard!
Made possible with Android Auto Maker.
Vibe-coded with OpenAI Codex (GPT-6.1 Sol, High).
Built as an Android Auto developer app, featuring touchscreen controls and audio playback through the car's speakers.
For safety reasons, the app cannot be operated while driving.
This app is a technical proof of concept and will not be distributed."
"Hi all! This is a (no-talking) demo of a DIY 6-voice desktop analog synthesizer I have been working on.
The hardware of each voice features two SSI 2131 VCOs, an SSI 2144 filter, a high pass filter, a wave folder, and ring mod.
All voice circuitry was made with SSI chips, op-amps, OTAs, and discrete components.
There is one effect, an 8-stage analog phaser.
There is an ST microcontroller for MIDI, voice control, display driving, front panel scanning, etc. Control voltages are produced by a DAC80501, as well as by the ST."
There is a Creator in every human being. Our mission is to empower those who have not and cannot.
Source code for the Behringer IGNITE 64-channel multi-track sequencer.
Key features
64-channel multi-track sequencer with a song, scene, track and pattern structure
Patterns of up to 16 bars with 16 steps per bar, scenes of up to 200 bars, 96 PPQN timing
Real-time recording, undo, fill, solo/skip, gang and sculpt functions
Transpose control and up to 10 user-defined scales
Internal General MIDI sound engine
5 MIDI DIN in/out pairs, USB MIDI, and USB host MIDI for up to 5 devices
MIDI clock sync, MIDI Machine Control and remote control
8 CV and 8 Gate jacks with calibration, plus sync in/out
Wi-Fi connectivity
Release status
This repository contains the IGNITE application, its audio engine and hardware protocol, and the Buildroot tree for the Linux image. Material that could not be redistributed was removed, so some parts need your own replacements before they build (see the README in each folder). There is no official firmware release here yet.
Front panel Touchscreen 16 RGB step pads, each with its own encoder 8 assignable knobs (A–H) and a jog wheel ROW and BAR encoders Transport, song/scene/track/pattern, and edit buttons USB-A port (5 V, 1 A) with a USB STOP button
"I created a custom patch for the official 2.3.4 firmware that adds a screen saver, speed change without pitch change, vertical waveform zoom, and an easy way to reset parameters to their defaults."
Additional details via the developer:
"I’ve put together a free, unofficial customization of 1010music Bitbox MkII firmware 2.3.4, adding a few features I’ve wanted on my own module. The customized version identifies itself as 2.3.4+c.
What’s added:
Vertical waveform zoom: pinch/spread vertically to adjust waveform height from 25–3200%. This makes quiet samples easier to see and lets you shrink loud waveforms. Horizontal zoom still works normally. A stationary two-finger tap restores 100% vertical zoom and horizontal fit. This only changes the display, not the audio.
Optional screen saver: a black screen after 1, 2, 3, 5, 10, 15, 30, or 60 minutes of inactivity. It’s disabled by default, under Tools → Disp. Playback continues while blanked. The first touch, button press, or encoder movement only wakes the display, preventing accidental edits.
Optional MIDI/CV-trigger wake: choose MIDI, CV triggers, or both. MIDI clock and active sensing are excluded. Unlike physical wake controls, the first incoming musical event still performs its normal action.
Pitch-preserving Speed: 50–200% playback speed, with a dedicated SPEED dial on the Sample-mode LFO/Spd page. It supports live adjustment and the normal INFO modulation editor, including LFO/CV modulation. At 100%, it uses native playback.
Double-tap dial defaults: double-tap a numeric dial to restore its default base value. Modulation sources and amounts remain intact.
Each looper is controlled by a column of 4 pads (bottom to top):
Red — Rec Green — Play White — Stop Rainbow color — Select (also opens the looper's parameter page) The first looper sets the base loop length. Every other looper is quantized to it: recording can start freely at any time, but playback always launches on a multiple of the first looper's length, so all 8 loopers stay in sync.
Step sequencing
Each looper has its own step pattern, controlled with Move's step buttons. Turning a step off mutes the looper's output at that point in the loop — the volume envelope for muting is shaped by the Attack and Release parameters.
"We spoke to Andrew from Tin Man Synths about his range of DIY Eurorack Modules, a set of simple through-hole designs built around accessible analogue and digital circuits.
The context was China's DIY synth scene, where importing synth brands and beginner kits can be difficult or expensive. Tin Man Synths focuses partly on making local DIY resources more available, alongside carrying other brands.
The range includes a transposing sequencer, which allows one sequence to transpose another, and clocking the two parts out of sync creates a longer rolling pattern of 32 to 64 steps. Other modules include dual attack-release envelopes, a side-chain VCA, matrix mixer, output stages, a semitone voltage-offset processor, the Radius 2164-based filter, voltage-controlled slew, a 40106 VCO, a voltage-controlled LFO, and Daisy Seed-based delay and granular effects.
The modules use through-hole construction, with bare PCBs around $10 and full kits around 400–500 RMB, or roughly $50–60.
Availability is currently mainly China and Southeast Asia."
Note, some of his points are how many feel about Behringer making "clones", especially of gear currently in production.
"Musicians attack anyone who uses AI in music, then cheer when someone vibe-codes new firmware for their synth. Is that a double standard?
In one weekend in October, three different aftermarket firmwares hit the $60 M-Vave FM1. One made it a virtual analog synth, one a four-track groovebox, and one a Roland-style drum machine. Most of them were built by non-programmers using AI tools like Claude Code. Then M-Vave released an official open-source SDK, and Akai and Behringer are moving the same way.
In this video I look at where the creative community draws its line on AI, and why that line seems to move depending on who gets hurt:
Why AI-coded firmware gets cheers while AI music gets attacked
AI code is trained on decades of human developers’ work, just as AI music is trained on artists
AI clones of the Adobe suite, and illegal Hydrasynth emulators that run stolen ROMs
The real risks: a bricked MPC2000, DSP timing bugs, possible malware and abandoned projects
Why manufacturers are now handing firmware development to their users
My own AI use, including my thumbnails, and where I draw the line
This video isn’t against AI and it isn’t for it. It’s about being consistent. Where is your line, and does it still hold when the thing on offer is free?"
"Can you build a playable synthesizer in a single afternoon? Here's my attempt: a DIY synth built from a basic ESP32 I had lying around.
At its heart is a DCO: a digitally controlled oscillator. The waveform isn't generated in code. It comes straight from the PWM outputs, while the code only sets the pitch, pulse width and modulation. The result is a fat, raw, monophonic sound with accurate notes and no tuning headaches.
How this ESP32 synth works:
• Two PWM signals from GPIO 18 and 19
• A simple resistor mixer and a capacitor on the output
• MIDI input built around a 6N137 optocoupler, three resistors and a socket (powered from the ESP32 board)
• Pitch Bend and Modulation over MIDI
• Pulse width and detune of the second oscillator controlled by knobs
What this synthesizer doesn't have (yet): an envelope, polyphony and a filter. They can all be added later in the analog part of the signal path, and I'll start working on them soon."
"Warren Burt arrived in Australia in 1975 and the landscape of Australian electronic and experimental music changed forever. An encyclopaedic repository of works and theories in the field - Warren has been educating and inspiring generations for half a century. His work spans almost all conceivable genres and modalities ranging from his Aardvarks series of pieces (that are also devised instruments) to works exploring incompetence as a paradigm and even compositions designed to propagate in gasses other than oxygen! Since his arrival he has been an almost constant agitator and organiser, creating new performance contexts and ways to educate people both within and outside of the institutions that have been lucky enough to have him on staff.
About Oral Histories:
Storytelling is an essential part of what it means to be human. When we share our stories we create space for real exchange and a deeper sense of empathy toward one another. At MESS we are conscious that so much of what has happened in Australian electronic music was never written down. Even when things are documented formally in books and journals - that very process can create an orthodox history which is inevitably incomplete and riddled with unconscious bias. So what we are doing is sitting down with the people who have made a lasting contribution to the form and asking them to tell us about their experiences in their own words.
The Oral Histories project was funded initially by a local histories grant from the Public Record Office of Victoria.
"behringer has put the KICK source code on github, and it got me wondering if the FM-1 has helped kick off something bigger in the synth world.
in this video, i take a look at what they've actually released and why i think it's interesting. is open-source software the future of music hardware, or am i reading too much into it?
obviously, we don't know if this has anything to do with the FM-1, but i'd love to hear what you think.
"A NEW and UGLY MPC, but not made by AKAI! It seems like Behringer has the first prototype of their MPC One clone ready and is asking for your help to bring it to life by open-sourcing the firmware. What do you think about this sampler? And how long will it take until they actually release it?"
"Behringer KICK (BE 0700-AAM)
Source code for the Behringer KICK.
Key features
AI camera for gesture control
Touchscreen
16 RGB pads, 8 banks
Sampler with sample editing, step sequencer and looper
Over 300 built-in effects
4 assignable knobs and a jog wheel
MIDI in/out, USB and 4 CV / Gate jacks"
