Lunar Modulator

Playing it

Keys

Click or touch; lower on a key plays louder. Computer keys A W S E D R F G Y H U J K O L P ; [ ' play the first 19 keys, F3 to B4. Hold SEL (SHIFT) and press MONO or POLY (the black keys C#5 and D#5) to set the sound's Voice Mode: MONO gives Mono, and pressed again Legato; POLY gives Poly.

OCT− / OCT+

Z / X. Both at once reset octave and transpose; hold one and turn ALGORITHM to transpose, as on the FM-1.

Encoders

Drag up or down, or scroll. ← → SELECT (page), ↑ ↓ PRESETS (sound), - = ALGORITHM (the sound's model, or the effect in FX mode). KNOB1–4 turn the four parameters on screen.

Buttons

FX shows the effects (below), GLO the global page, HOME goes back. On the global page SELECT turns to Key, where KNOB1 and KNOB2 set the project key's root and scale, kept with the sequencer's set. MASTER is the volume. Esc releases every note.

MIDI

Notes, pitch bend (±2 semitones), CC 7 volume, CC 123 all notes off.

Sequencer

PLAY/STOP, or Space, starts and stops the sequencer, which holds a one-bar demo pattern on track 1. SEQ shows the track: the tempo, the transport and four bars of steps with the playhead; HOME, FX or GLO go back. In SEQ mode the white keys are the bar's 16 steps (also 1–8 and C V B N M , . /): tap one to add or remove a note, the last chord you played, or C4. Hold a step to edit it on the knobs: velocity, length, probability and condition; SELECT turns to invert. Hold A and press B to make A's note reach B. The OP1 and OP3 keys page bars, or nudge held steps; OCT transposes them. SEL (or Shift) is SHIFT: with a step held, the white keys add pitches and a tap of SHIFT alone clears the step; with none held, SHIFT and key 10 sets full velocity, and SHIFT with PLAY/STOP restarts. REC records what you play on the keys (outside SEQ mode) or at MIDI IN: stopped, after a bar's count-in. Hold REC in SEQ mode while stopped to enter notes one step at a time: the white keys play and enter their notes, keys held together make a chord, OP3 leaves a rest (or ties held keys into the next step), OP1 steps back, and SHIFT with a white key moves to that step. SHIFT and REC keep what you just played (Capture); stopped, it also reads your tempo and starts playing: SELECT tries another tempo, and any other press keeps the one you hear.

Tracks

Eight tracks, all on Sound 1 to begin with. Hold SEQ and press white key 1–8 to work on that track, from any mode; MONO and POLY (the black keys C#5 and D#5) step to the previous and next track in SEQ mode. Choosing a track empties what Capture holds. OP6 (F#4) mutes the track; hold it and the white keys 1–8 mute and unmute tracks, lit while they play. With SHIFT held, white key 2 opens the Track page (its sound, or MIDI out on a channel, and mute; turn SELECT for its lanes), 3 the Clip page (speed, length, transpose, quantize), 5, 7 or 9 the Set page (tempo, swing, default quantize, metronome), 6 turns the metronome's click on or off, and 16 steps the clip's quantize. SELECT also walks on from the sound's pages to these; SEQ goes back to the steps.

Locks

Hold a step and turn SELECT past its two Step pages to the sound's pages: there a knob locks its parameter on that step, shown in gold over the dim value it has elsewhere, and a dot marks a parameter with a lane (eight per track). A step with locks has a gold dot in the grid. SHIFT and a knob clears that step's lock; OP5 (D#4) with steps held clears their locks, and held, a knob clears that parameter's lane on the track. Recording while playing, a knob writes its moves into the step that plays. A knob on a locked parameter turns in its 128 steps, and the lane follows it.

DX7 patches

FM6 plays voices in the DX7's format: its 32 built-in voices, then User 1 to User 32. Load DX7 patches…, or a .syx file dropped on the page, fills the user slots: a bank of 32 fills all of them, a single voice the next one. The current sound then plays the first voice loaded (it becomes FM6 if it was not), and ALGORITHM steps through the voices by name. The file is checked (header, length, checksum) and read in this browser; nothing is uploaded, and the voices last until you power off. Load only files you are entitled to use.

Files

SAVE on the panel keeps the whole project in this browser, and the page keeps it too as you work (autosave), so the next visit starts where you left off. Save… downloads the project, the current sound, its effects, the master effects or the mod rack as a .lunar file, or the sequencer's set as a .movy1 file for Movy; Open…, or files dropped on the page, loads them. A project replaces everything; a sound, effects or a clip loads where you choose. A file that would not fit the FM-1 is refused, with what it would need, and nothing changes; what a load replaced stays in Recent, with Undo load. Copy link makes a link that holds the project. Files are read and written in this browser; nothing is uploaded, and nothing is sent to a device.

Sounds

Up to four sounds play at once. Hold SEL and turn PRESETS to choose the one the keys play and the knobs edit; PRESETS then picks its engine (Sounds 2–4 can be empty). The meter in the screen's bottom bar shows how much of the FM-1's memory they take, in percent: whatever would take it past 100 % is refused.

Effects

In FX mode SELECT walks the current sound's two insert effects, a Mix page with the four sounds' levels on the knobs, and the two master effects every sound goes through; ALGORITHM picks the effect, and SEL then SELECT swaps it with its neighbour.

Arpeggiator

Tap ARP to switch the current sound's arpeggiator on (its pages open) or off; hold ARP to latch, so the notes keep playing after you let go and the next chord replaces them. SHIFT and ARP shows the pages without switching. SELECT turns the pages (PLAY, RHYTHM, CHANCE, FEEL, MORE, KEYS, SEED), the knobs set the mode, rate, gate, octaves, rhythm patterns and chance, and ALGORITHM picks the stock FM-1's arp modes as presets; past them it puts another MIDI effect in the arpeggiator's place, when the build has one: Acid Gen, which plays seeded acid lines from the key you hold (made for the Acid Bass sound). The keys, MIDI and the sequencer's notes for that sound all go through it, and it follows the sequencer's tempo, running or not; while the sequencer plays, its steps fall on the sequencer's beat. Stop takes back the sequencer's notes and leaves the ones you latched. Recording keeps the notes you played, so the arpeggio comes back on playback. Its LED is lit while it is on and blinks while it latches. The arpeggiator follows Yarns' (Emilie Gillet) with note orders after MCL's (Justin Mammarella) and chance after Super Arp's (Handcrafted Media); the code is this project's own.

Modulation

Two LFOs, two envelopes that every note restarts, and a random source. LFO or ENV shows them a page at a time on the knobs; ALGORITHM changes a module. Hold LFO or ENV and turn a knob on the sound's, an effect's or a module's page to send it there, the turn setting how much (with a mouse, Tab to the button and hold Enter while you scroll the knob). EDIT lists every connection: KNOB1 picks the source, KNOB2 the destination, KNOB3 the amount, ALGORITHM the second page; SEL shows its chain. A parameter that is moved shows its name in light blue-green, its range as a bracket of that colour and where it is now as a white tick. The modules follow Mutable Instruments' Peaks and Braids (Emilie Gillet), Schwung's LFO (Charles Vestal), DaisySP's sample and hold (Electrosmith) and Music Thing Modular's Turing Machine and Workshop System card 106 (Tom Whitwell, Matt Allison), all MIT; the code is this project's own.

Manual

The user manual describes every control, engine and effect; also as a PDF.

Panel to scale from the M-VAVE manual's dimensions (161.5 × 96.5 mm) and the owner's board photo; the encoders' printed names and the 14 buttons are the manual's. The example files are MIT, like the repository. Engines credit Emilie Gillet (Mutable Instruments, MIT) and the Schwung module authors; see the repository's engines/README.md. FM6 is msfa by Raph Levien for Google (Apache License 2.0), borrowed with thanks, as is its name, from Felucca's FM6 engine by hugelton; it reads the DX7's voice format (not affiliated with Yamaha). Acid Bass, Acid Gen, Comet Kit and Crater Kit, in builds with the GPL switch on, are the 303, the TB-3PO generator, the 909 kit and the 808 kit of fm1-x0x by Charles Vestal, after Open303 by Robin Schmidt, the Phazerville Hemisphere Suite's TB_3PO, 9W9 by athousanddetails and ER-99 by Matthew Cieplak, whose hi-hat, ride and crash recordings the 909 kit plays, and 8W8 by athousanddetails, whose rim shot is Yoshinosuke Horiuchi's and Sam Aaron's sc808 (after the TB-303, the TR-909 and the TR-808, Roland marks named only as credit). Drawbar, Trio and Phase Bend, likewise, are the WHEEL, TRIO and PHASE engines of Felucca by Leo Kuroshita (Hügelton Instruments), PHASE after his CrispyZebra. Squash and the Limiter's Round mode port Airwindows plug-ins by Chris Johnson (MIT). Colours: Rosé Pine Moon (MIT). Type: Audiowide by Astigmatic (SIL Open Font License 1.1, licence); on the screen, beside the project's own 5×9, Spleen by Frederic Cambus (BSD 2-Clause, licence). M-VAVE and FM-1 are their owners' names for their synthesizer; this project is not affiliated with them.