LOF-1 Experimental

a lofi groovebox for the FM-1: you play the lead, a tired jazz band follows, an old record crackles under it. The same code the FM-1 would run.

Turn your phone sideways for bigger controls.

Off. Sound starts when you switch it on.

To your DAW

Audio out Stereo mix 8 channels: each voice apart

Channels 1–2 the mix, 3 lead, 4 comp, 5 bass, 6 answer, 7 drums, 8 dust. The voices come dry, at the mix's level. It needs an output with 8 channels: an audio interface, or a loopback driver such as BlackHole (Mac) or VB-Audio (Windows) set as the browser's output, recorded into the DAW.

MIDI Send to MIDI in from

Remote: with LOF-1 on your FM-1 and MIDI connected here, hold SEL and press GLO on the FM-1. Its panel plays this emulator and goes quiet itself.

MIDI in: notes play the lead (from any keyboard you connect), and with Global › MIDI set to Clock or Both, a DAW's clock drives the tempo (START plays from the top, STOP stops). MIDI out (Global › MIDI: Notes or Both): the lead, comp, bass and answer on channels 1–4, the drums on 10. To reach a DAW on this computer, use a virtual MIDI port: the IAC Driver (Mac) or loopMIDI (Windows).

Pages and knobs

One button a voice; press it again for its second page. SELECT steps through all of them. ALGORITHM picks the page's instrument (or the kit, or DUST's character). PRESETS picks a preset, 01–10. Each keeps your changes while you play; SAVE on the Global page stores the one playing.

Groove, Groove 2 HOME

Tempo: 60–100 BPM (also HOME + SELECT).
Swing: How late the off-sixteenths fall.
Jazz: The chords' colour: triads, 7ths, 9ths, 11ths.
Busy: How much the comp, bass and drums play around you.
Groove 2: Drift (off, or a change every 4–64 bars), Drums (on a change: keep the pattern, the next one, or a random one, after a fill), Pool (which patterns it picks from: 1–2 to 1–8), Chords (keep the progression, or swap to its other one). SEL + SEQ: a change on the next bar.

Lead, Daydream, Daydream 2 ENV

Level, Tone, Release: The keys' instrument (20: Rhodes, Wurli, two uprights, vibes, kalimba, glock, strumstick, muted trumpet, tenor sax, flute, harmonica, bell, sine, FM piano, marimba, harp, clarinet, ocarina, music box).
Lazy: Loosens the velocity, and the ghost's timing.
Daydream: Wait (4, 8, 16 bars, Always), Fill (how much of the time it plays: sparse phrases to non-stop), Density (how many notes a beat), Mood (stepwise to leaps): when the keys rest that long, a ghost takes the lead. Any key takes it back. SEL + ENV: on and off.
Daydream 2: Range, Legato (short to tied notes), Repeat (how often it comes back to its last motif), Dynamics (how much it accents).

Comp, Comp style LFO

Level, Tone, Voicing, Roll: Close, open, shell or spread voicings, rolled like a tired pianist.
Pattern, Length, Push, Spread: Held, stabs, offbeats or an arpeggio; how long; how often it anticipates the next chord; how wide.

Bass EDIT · Answer ARP

Bass: Level, Tone, Pattern (roots, root-fifth, walking, dub), Slide.
Answer: Level, Tone, Chatty (how often it answers your phrases), Echo (imitates yours, or invents its own). SEL + ARP: on and off.

Drums, Kit SEQ

Drums: Level, Crunch, Pattern (1–8, on the bar), Fill. Hold SEQ for the sequencer: the white keys are the 16 steps, OCT− / OCT+ the lane.
Kit: Kick, Snare, Hats, Perc levels; ALGORITHM: Dusty (samples) or Tape (synthesized).

Dust, Dust 2, Space, Global, Global 2 GLO

Dust: Level, Age, Surface, Hiss; ALGORITHM: Vinyl, Cassette, Reel or Radio.
Dust 2: Grain (a haze of the music itself), Smear, Duck (under the kick), Hum.
Space: Tape (wow, flutter, saturation), Mellow (low-pass), Room, Echo.
Global: Root, Scale, Keys (Chromatic, Scale, or Chords: each key plays the scale's chord on that note, as Jazz has it), MIDI. Here the keys set the scale instead of playing (AMB-1's way): tap a lit key to take it out, a dark one to put it in, for a scale of your own (Custom). SAVE here stores the preset playing, with its scale (never Side B); held, it goes back to the factory's.
Global 2: Theme (Lamp, Matcha, Sakura, Midnight, Sepia), CRT (the old-TV look, on or off), Tune, Lights. SAVE here stores them.

Buttons

Keys play the lead. The band hears which chord you imply and follows on the beat; stop playing and it carries on by itself.
PLAY play / stop. REC holds the chord, so you can solo over it. SAVE is Side B: a breakdown on the next bar; again, back in with a fill. On the Global page, SAVE stores the preset.
FX turns the keys into effects, and the screen shows a map of which key does what: stutters, record skip, half time, tape stop, backspin, muffle, radio, mutes, throws (white); wobble, crush, fill, grain freeze, dropout, solos (black). Hold SAVE in FX to lock effects on: tap as many keys as you like (they turn violet); keys already held lock too. Tap a locked key alone to turn it off. Press FX again and the locks keep playing while the keys play notes; SEL + FX turns every lock off.
SEL held + a key: the key's root. On the drum pages, SEL + white keys 1–8: the pattern. SEL + SEQ: a change on the next bar (as Drift's). SEL + HOME: the keys play single notes or whole chords. OCT− / OCT+ the lead's octave.
Hold a button for a second and a card says what it does (with a mouse: Shift-click to hold it).

Mouse, touch, keyboard

Drag a knob up or down, or use the scroll wheel over it. Click or touch buttons and keys.
Play like a DAW's keyboard: A is C4, W S E D F T G … up to ' (F5). Z X C V: F3, G3, A3, B3.
Space PLAY, Enter REC, Esc HOME, , / . OCT− / OCT+, ↑ ↓ SELECT. Or plug in a MIDI keyboard (Connect MIDI, then pick it under "MIDI in from").

The presets

Ten, numbered like HYP-1's. Each starts as one of these and becomes yours when you store over it:

01 Rhodes, upright bass, vinyl. D Dorian, 78.
02 The felt upright, vibes answering, a cassette. F major, 72.
03 Muted trumpet, walking bass, Tape kit. G minor, 84.
04 Kalimba over an organ, on reel to reel. C major, 88.
05 Tenor sax, a warm pad, sub bass. A minor, 70.
06 Strumstick arpeggios, harmonica, the radio. E Mixolydian, 90.
07 Glock, tape strings, slow. B♭ major, 64.
08 Hands off from the start (Daydream always). E minor pentatonic, 76.
09 Wurli over organ offbeats, root-fifth bass, 9ths. A Dorian, 92.
10 Late night: sine lead, pad, sub, a worn record, 11ths. E♭ minor, 60.

What you hear is the firmware running at the FM-1's 44.1 kHz, not a recording. The sampled instruments are Versilian Studios' CC0 libraries (VCSL, VSCO-2 CE). Running FM-1 firmware in the browser comes from Groove OS's emulator, by way of AMB-1 and ECO-1.