FRASIL, home

Status: 1.1 · out now

FRASIL

Drone textures frozen in motion

A custom firmware that turns the M-VAVE FM-1 into an instrument for ambient drones and textures.

Try it in the browser Read the guide Install on FM-1 Download Back up your scenes

The instrument1/11

The notes stay where you put them. The sound is never still.

FRASIL turns the M-VAVE FM-1 into an instrument for ambient drones and textures. A tap latches a drone: a note, or a chord built in the key you chose. Pressing harder makes it swell. The timbre drifts and ebbs on its own, slowly, and everything flows into a large, lush reverb with shimmer and freeze.

Your notes, and chance where you let it

The drones are the notes you light, and they never change. Above them, GLINT plays small icy bells; under them, BASS holds one deep note, or walks a slow line of its own. GLINT’s arpeggiator plays the keys you hold; GLINT’s sequencer and the bass’s play the steps you write. Chance comes in only where you let it: CHANCE skips steps, RANDOM and DRIFT pick the arpeggio’s order, SPARKLE lets glints fall on the notes your drones hold.

Who it is for

For players who want a sound to hold rather than a pattern to follow. FRASIL is designed as one voice in a larger setup: it takes MIDI notes, pressure, CCs and clock over USB and TRS, a channel for each of its tracks.

  • 8drone voices
  • 3layers each
  • 60 sof reverb tail
  • 22GLINT presets
  • 8bass models
  • 16scenes

Pressure2/11

Pressure warms the ice.

On the screen, every voice is a current carrying ice. Hold a key and press into it: the voice swells and opens, and its crystals warm to lamp light. Let go, and it stays lit.

Tap a key
It rises over ATTACK and stays.
Tap it again
It fades over RELEASE.
Hold and press
It swells and opens. PRESSURE sets how much.
Hold ENV
SWELL: after 0.4 s, every voice swells together.
SWELL, on FX
Every voice swelled as far as you turn it, and held there.
A3 · D3 · G2 Three voices of D minor, drawn as FRASIL's screen draws them. Hold to press.

Layers3/11

The current, the crystals, the mist.

Every note you light is a voice, up to eight, and every voice has three layers. All three play every note: you mix them and shape each one. On the screen each is a thing in the river, and strata under the waterline show the exact mix, WARMTH with it.

  1. CHOIR's stratum on the screen: a solid line

    CHOIR the current

    Three detuned saws, or pulses, through a low-pass filter that follows the note. Warm, wide, vocal.

    CHOIR II SHAPE takes the saws toward a square, hollow and woody, then narrow pulses, bright and nasal. INTERVAL moves the centre saw an octave or a fifth; RESONANCE and TYPE shape the filter: LOW, BAND or HIGH.

  2. PARTIALS' stratum on the screen: a line of ice crystals

    PARTIALS the crystals

    Eight additive harmonics, each drifting on its own in level and tuning. Bright or dark, odd, stretched into bells, with a formant.

    PARTIALS II EVOLVE lets their levels wander deeper and quicker; BEAT makes each one pulse at its own pace. FORMANT and PEAK lift them around one harmonic, as a vowel does, up to that one alone: the drone sings a single overtone.

  3. BREATH's stratum on the screen: a soft band of haze

    BREATH the mist

    Noise, a hiss or sparse grains, through three resonators tuned to the note, from air to glass.

    BREATH II GRAIN turns the hiss into grains that ring like ice ticking, or rain on glass. PITCH moves the resonators an octave down, or up into a halo over the drone.

24 drones PRESETS, on any page: each sets the three layers and the drone’s own

  • MIST
  • CATHEDRAL
  • GLACIER
  • ABYSS
  • AURORA
  • EMBER
  • TIDE
  • DUST
  • WIND
  • ORGAN
  • HOLLOW
  • VOWEL
  • SHIMMER
  • CHANTER
  • ENSEMBLE
  • BELLS
  • NOCTURNE
  • HAZE
  • PULSE
  • RIME
  • DEEP
  • SPECTRAL
  • RUST
  • STILL

And CUSTOM your own: turn any of their settings and the drone becomes CUSTOM

Your drones’ notes never change. What moves on its own is the sound: MOTION, a slow random drift of each partial, detune and resonance; TIDE, a slow swell of the timbre over minutes. Turned up, CHANCE and SPARKLE let chance into GLINT’s notes.

LFO 1 · LFO 2 · LFO 3

Press LFO again: three LFOs of your own, seven shapes, free or on the beat. Each moves up to four settings together, around the values you gave them; a scene keeps it all.

The drone’s presets The layers’ second pages The LFOs

LFO 1 · SHAPE

FILTER · TIMBRE Each keeps its value and its white mark; the ice-blue one is where the LFO has it now.

Cloud4/11

Everything flows into the cloud.

WARMTH, a soft saturation, feeds CLOUD, the reverb: eight modulated lines with diffusion inside their loop, a pre-delay, and a shimmer pitched inside the loop. Its tail runs from 0.4 to 60 seconds.

Generative FX

FX opens on four knobs that play the whole sound. SWELL swells every voice and holds it there; SPARKLE lets glints fall by themselves, now and then, on the notes the drones hold; BLUR dissolves the drone into the cloud; SINK takes everything under, a low-pass on the whole mix.

Freeze

Hold FX: the cloud holds what is in it, without end and without darkening. Nothing more goes in: what you play next sounds dry over it. Hold FX again and it thaws, fading over DECAY. On the screen, the crystals set into a lattice and the water stills.

CLOUD
SIZE
DECAY 0.4–60 s
TONE
FREEZE OFF · ON
CLOUD II
DIFFUSION
MODULATION
PRE-DELAY 0–200 ms
WIDTH
CLOUD III
SHIMMER
INTERVAL +12 +7 +5 +19 −12
BRIGHT 700 Hz–8 kHz

Glint5/11

Small icy bells, above the drones.

GLINT is four voices of clean two-operator FM, played from the keys once SELECT turns them over to it. Never latched: each note rings and fades like a bell, while the drones keep sounding under it.

SEQ

MODE

The hand

Pressure makes a glint louder and longer. With VIBRATO, a wiggle of the finger bends its pitch, both ways around the note, as a string player’s does; a steady press stays in tune. SUSTAIN turns a bell into a lead.

The arpeggiator

It plays the GLINT keys you hold, one at a time, at RATE, over RANGE octaves, on the grid of MIDI clock or TEMPO. LATCH is on from the start: the pattern keeps playing after you lift your hands. Hold ARP to turn it off, or on again. Tap PLAY and it waits; again, it goes on from the top.

The sequencer

SEQ on SEQ (GLINT I, K2): 32 steps in place of the arpeggio, on the same grid. REC goes straight there and records you live as it runs, to a metronome; or write it a key a step. With RECORD off, the keys transpose it along the scale. PLAY stops it; again, it starts from the top. A NEW TAKE starts it over from nothing, and UNDO brings back the one before.

The delay

GLINT’s own, tempo-synced, from 1/32 to 1/2 with triplets and dotted times, mono or ping-pong. Its echoes go into the cloud too.

22 presets

  • ICE
  • BELL
  • BLIP
  • GLASS
  • CHIME
  • DROP
  • FROST
  • CELESTA
  • SINE
  • KALIMBA
  • MARIMBA
  • MUSIC BOX
  • VIBES
  • HARP
  • PIPE
  • BOWED

And six leads SUSTAIN holds them while the key is down

  • WARM LEAD
  • BRASS
  • SQUARE
  • SUB LEAD
  • STRINGS
  • REED

Bass6/11

One deep note, held like a drone.

Turn SELECT to BASS and the keys play it: one note at a time, the key’s note in the scale, OCTAVE octaves down. Tap another key and it glides there without starting again; tap its own key and it lets go. Press into it: louder, and its filter opens.

Or let it walk. The bass has a step sequencer of its own, two more pages under SEQ: sixteen steps, each a NOTE, a CUT or a HOLD, and each as long as you want it, from a sixteenth to four bars. A slow line under drones that never change. Write it step by step or live with REC, move it with a key; PLAY starts it with GLINT’s, on the same grid, and each scene keeps its own.

DRIVE into a soft clip, a resonant low-pass, and none of it in the reverb. A pure sine this low barely reaches the FM-1’s small speaker: DRIVE, or a richer MODEL, gives it the harmonics that let you hear it there. In headphones, SINE with DRIVE at 0 is a clean sub.

  1. SINEpure
  2. TRIANGLEsoft, a little hollow
  3. SQUAREhollow, woody
  4. SAWbright, buzzing
  5. REESEtwo saws ten cents apart, beating slowly
  6. SUBthe sine and its octave below
  7. ORGANthree drawbars: the note, its octave, its twelfth
  8. FMa sine modulating itself: round, growling

Harmony7/11

Set a key once. Every key you tap belongs to it.

Twelve scales, eight chords built from the scale’s own notes and seven fixed ones, three voicings. A key outside the scale plays the scale’s note just below it, and the scale’s keys glow faintly.

D3 plays D3 · F3 · A3: in D MINOR with TRIAD, a chord of the scale’s own notes.

Mixer8/11

The river breathes on the beat.

HOME’s second screen is a MIXER: a fader and a live meter for DRONE, BASS, GLINT and CLOUD, the reverb’s return.

PUMP
Ducks each track on the beat, as a sidechain from a kick would, without a kick: from 4 BARS to 1/8, on MIDI clock or TEMPO. DRONE, BASS and GLINT set how deep each one goes; the cloud pumps with the drones.
MASTERING
A light compressor on the whole output, its gain reduction on the screen, live.

PUMP · RATE

Scenes · MIDI9/11

Sixteen scenes. A channel for each track.

A scene holds the sound, the latched drones, GLINT’s arpeggio and its sequence, and the bass with its own. Hold SAVE and press REC to store one; hold SAVE and press a white key to load one of the sixteen, from any page. MORPH glides into it, over up to two minutes, and LOAD on SND ONLY leaves what plays playing while only the sound changes. Eight slots hold the factory scenes; eight are free.

  1. 01MISTD, chromatic · SINE
  2. 02GLASSA lydian, ADD9 wide · GLASS
  3. 03ABYSSD phrygian, FIFTH wide · DROP
  4. 04CHORALED minor, SEVENTH open · BELL
  5. 05WINDE penta minor, mostly BREATH · FROST
  6. 06BELLSC major, QUARTAL open · CHIME
  7. 07TIDEF dorian, SUS2 open · BLIP
  8. 08AURORAG mixolydian, TRIAD wide · CELESTA

MIDI over USB and TRS

Each track has its own channel, whatever the keys play. The drones’ notes go through the harmony, so a sequencer’s single note plays a chord; GLINT’s and BASS’s play as they come. Polyphonic aftertouch swells a note; channel pressure, the whole track. Program Change loads the scenes. Hold GLO and move a knob on your controller: it now turns the setting you touched last. Clock drives GLINT’s arpeggiator, its sequencer and its delay, the bass’s sequencer, and the synced LFOs; Start resets the grid and starts the sequences.

  • CH 1DRONE
  • CH 2GLINT
  • CH 3BASS

The screen10/11

A river at night, 240 pixels square.

Pitch is height above the waterline. Each voice is a current carrying ice; GLINT shines in the sky above; the bass is a slow swell across the river. Every setting wears the badge of the control that turns it: a blue disc for K1–K4, an orange one for the three encoders on the left.

  • The play page: the scene, MIST, with an amber dot (the sound changed) and the keys' badge (DRONE, octave -1) in the header; three voices as currents of ice in the river; the drone's mix and WARMTH as four strata under the waterline; KEYS (DRONE), the drone's preset (CUSTOM) and BODY at the bottom
    The play pageThree voices sounding, the drone's mix under the waterline.
  • The play page with a held key pressed in: its voice glows amber, its note names in lamp light
    PressureA held key pressed in: its voice glows amber.
  • GLINT notes shining above the river, ARP LATCH at its top right; the keys' badge blue: ARP, octave -1
    GLINTSELECT on GLINT, then a few keys: notes shining above the river.
  • FREEZE on: the FREEZE tag in the header, the crystals set into a lattice, the water still, the bass's D2 on the right
    FREEZEFX held: the crystals set into a lattice.
  • The bass under three drones: a slow swell across the river, D2 on the right, the keys' badge orange
    BASSSELECT on BASS, then a key: a slow swell across the river.
  • PRESETS turned: the drone's preset, EMBER, large over the river, 06/24 at the bottom
    A left encoder turnedPRESETS: the drone's preset, large over the river.
  • MIXER: the four faders, DRONE, BASS, GLINT and CLOUD at 100, and their meters
    MIXERHOME on the play page: four faders and their meters.
  • GENERATIVE FX, FX's first page: SWELL 0, SPARKLE 31, BLUR 24, SINK 0
    GENERATIVE FXFX: SWELL, SPARKLE, BLUR, SINK.
  • HARMONY: D, MINOR, TRIAD, CLOSE
    HARMONYSEL: D, MINOR, TRIAD, CLOSE.
  • GLINT SEQ, ARP's fifth page with TYPE on SEQ, the keys' badge GLINT (played as they are, to practise): STEP 1, NOTE D4, ACCENT ON, RECORD OFF; above, the sequence as a constellation of sixteen stars, each as high as its note, the accents larger, the step playing with a line of light through it
    GLINT SEQREC, or ARP five times with TYPE on SEQ: sixteen steps, an accent on each beat.
  • SCENES: scene 03, ABYSS, sound only; in a box of their own, PLAY LOAD and SAVE + REC STORE; MORPH CUT, LOAD SND+NOTES
    SCENESSAVE: slot 03, ABYSS; MORPH, LOAD.
  • FRASIL's logo screen: the name half under the waterline, granules of frasil drifting in the sky, by Styves Goupil
    The logo screenHOME on the MIXER: the logo, alive.

Install11/11

1.1 · out now

Try it first. Then give it to the FM-1.

  1. 01

    In the browser

    The emulator runs the same code the FM-1 runs, with sound. No FM-1 needed.

    Play

  2. 02

    On the FM-1

    From the browser: Chrome or Edge, the FM-1 connected by USB, through FRASIL on The FM-1 Firmware Hub. From a terminal: download frasil-X.Y.fwsc from the releases, then, from a checkout of the repository:

    python3 base/tools/fm1_install.py frasil-X.Y.fwsc
    Download

  3. 03

    And back

    Install M-VAVE’s V15 from the hub. If the FM-1 no longer starts, hold OCT− while you switch it on: it waits for an update over USB.

    The install guide

Good to know Installing is at your own risk; the installer can always put M-VAVE's own firmware back.