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Synth Waves: Firmware Mods Teach Your Synth New Tricks

Unofficial firmware is reshaping the Prophet Rev4, MicroFreak, Model:Cycles and M-Vave keyboards, while Fred's Lab revives the Töörö. Synth Waves, October.

6 min readMusic. Culture. Creation.
Xdripia Waves Synth Waves cover: a glowing chip with a morphing waveform, frosted glass firmware-progress and envelope panels and a synth keyboard on a dark dotted canvas, with the headline Firmware Mods, New Tricks

Synth Waves is our column about synthesizers, sound design and the people who make electronic music. Each edition looks at what's new in the synth world and what it means for producers.

Our first edition ended with a promise to look at firmware updates worth installing. We didn't expect the topic to arrive this quickly. In the past two weeks, unofficial firmware has landed for a Sequential Prophet, an Arturia MicroFreak, an Elektron Model:Cycles, a Novation Circuit Tracks and a whole family of budget M-Vave keyboards. Much of it was written with help from AI coding assistants, and it is changing what a synth you already own can do.

Why it is happening now

Gearnews calls it "the vibe-coding wave of new firmware", and Synthtopia notes that AI-assisted programming is "already making a big impact on the scope and variety of software and firmware available to electronic musicians". Writing code is now the fast part. As the developer of the M-Vave SMK-37 ports put it in a comment on Synthtopia: "you can create a synth firmware in a day with AI, but then the hard part of testing and getting it 'feel' right comes."

A flagship gets an arpeggiator: Prophet Rev4

The most ambitious mod targets instruments that are still in production. According to Synthtopia, prophet-rev4-mods adds to the Prophet-5 Rev4 and Prophet-10 Rev4:

  • an arpeggiator with five modes, one to four octaves, 40-300 BPM, tap tempo and MIDI clock sync;
  • a polyphonic step sequencer with up to 512 steps and chords of up to 10 notes, which can feed the arpeggiator to turn a chord sequence into a moving progression;
  • a front-panel octave shift of plus or minus two octaves, with settings and sequences saved in user programs.

It is free on GitHub under the MIT license, uses existing front-panel controls and patches Sequential's official Main OS 2.1.0 through a browser-based patcher. The project is not affiliated with Sequential. The author reports testing it on a Prophet-10 Rev4; the Prophet-5 Rev4 remains untested on hardware.

MicroFreak gets freakier: Superfreaker

Superfreaker, now in beta, promises Drive, Lo-Fi, a tape echo, a separate Release, Legato Glide, a metronome, transpose and a Shift latch for the Arturia MicroFreak, Synthtopia reports. Gearnews adds a +7 dB boost for the headphone and line outputs and a square-wave sub octave. It installs through a patcher, with an option to go back to the original firmware.

Grooveboxes: Model:Cycles and Circuit Tracks

Model-TG is a free, open-source mod for the Elektron Model:Cycles (OS 1.13). As Synthtopia details, it adds:

  • a Sampler machine on any track, with seven playback modes from One shot and Slice to Granular and Wave;
  • resampling of a track, the whole mix or your computer's audio over USB;
  • a performance page with beat-repeat and 12 master FX, plus slide trigs and Scale Lock.

Model-TG is not made, supported or endorsed by Elektron, and Synthtopia notes that it follows Elektron's decision to ban discussion of firmware mods on its official forum. On the Novation side, the CIRCUITS-HACKS-RC mod for Circuit Tracks lets MIDI tracks be used as sound engines, according to Gearnews.

The cheap test bench: M-Vave FM-1 and SMK-37

The busiest scene is around M-Vave's inexpensive FM-1 and its 37-key cousin, the SMK-37. Synthtopia points out that their low cost makes them a relatively risk-free platform for experiments. Recent highlights:

  • FoMni, a free chord-harp firmware for the FM-1 inspired by the Suzuki Omnichord: pick a chord on the black keys and strum the white keys (Synthtopia).
  • SMK-37 ports of FM-1 firmwares, including an 8-voice microtonal drone synth and a 909/808/303 groovebox, plus a port kit written so it can be followed with a coding assistant (Synthtopia).
  • Baud Girl SMK-37+VA, with a virtual analog engine that stacks seven detuned oscillators per note, an 8-bit groovebox engine and a 64-step sequencer with per-step ratchet and probability (Synth Anatomy).
  • zvenson Obervave, an 8-voice polysynth inspired by the American polysynths of 1979-1984, with a SEM-style morphing filter and small per-voice offsets in tuning, cutoff and envelopes (Synth Anatomy).

The official route: Fred's Lab Töörö mkII

Not every second life is unofficial. Fred's Lab had to pull the original Töörö because some components were no longer available, and has answered with a revision rather than a reissue. Synth Anatomy reports that the Töörö mkII upgrades the sound engine to lower the noise floor and reduce zipper noise, adds a noise source and a ring modulator, and keeps the analog FL A847 filter and MPE mode. It is on pre-order at €499 including VAT, with the first batch due to ship in October 2026.

AI as a patch assistant

AI is also reaching sound design itself. A video from Jose's Vintage Keys, covered by Synthtopia, shows Anthropic's Claude making patches on a Yamaha CS-80 fitted with the Mark Cox MIDI upgrade. Synthtopia's view is that AI will likely become an important tool for musicians "who'd rather be playing than tweaking".

Before you flash anything

Gearnews asks the right question: "Would you be willing to risk the brick?" Our checklist:

  1. Back up first. Save patches, projects and samples before any update.
  2. Know the way back. Prefer projects that document how to restore the official firmware, as the Prophet mod and Superfreaker do.
  3. Check what was tested. "Tested on a Prophet-10" is not the same as "tested on your Prophet-5".
  4. Expect no support from the maker. These projects are unofficial, so problems go to the developer, not to the manufacturer.
  5. Practise on cheap gear. An inexpensive FM-1 is a better place to learn than a flagship polysynth.

What this means for producers

The line between buying a synth and shaping one is getting thinner. Features that once arrived only with a new model now come from a GitHub repository. The trade-off is quality control: code is cheap, while testing and the right feel still take time. At Xdripia Waves we think the winners will be the instruments with clear recovery paths and communities that test carefully.

Coming up in Synth Waves

Next time we'll turn from firmware to the albums and artists pushing synth music forward. Got a mod, a patch or a release we should cover? Tell us at @xdripiawaves.

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