On 16 September Elektron announced that hacks and firmware modifications would no longer be shared on Elektronauts, its own forum, or on its social channels. We covered that at the time, and noted that the policy banned posting files on Elektron’s property rather than modifying hardware you own. Three weeks later there was a forum built specifically to host them.
On 17 October, Matthew Piecora — who runs the EZBOT channel — published a 55-minute video about an hour-long call with the company.
What is actually established
Very little, and deliberately so. Piecora’s own description is the whole of the verifiable framing:
I had an hour long call with Elektron about AI and its impact on the company, their thoughts on hacked firmware, and I tried some out myself. Elektron gave me their blessing to share what we discussed on my channel. This is NOT an official statement from Elektron, this is my recount and interpretation of our in-depth meeting.
So: three topics, one hour, permission granted, and an explicit refusal to let the result be read as policy. There is no Elektron press release, no named spokesperson and no quoted sentence from the company. The video’s first three minutes are technical difficulties; the chapter marker for the substance is literally titled “Start here.”
We are not going to paraphrase a secondhand recount into things Elektron said. Watch it or don’t. What is worth saying is what the existence of this call means, because that part is a matter of record.
A company that banned the topic in September is now briefing a modder about it
Four weeks ago the position was that this material could not appear on Elektron’s own property. This week the company spent an hour with one of the most visible Elektron users on YouTube, discussing hacked firmware and AI, and then authorised him to publish his account of it.
That is not a reversal. The forum policy, as far as anyone can tell, still stands. But it is a shift from not here to let’s talk, and it arrives with the specific hedge — “not an official statement” — that companies use when they want the conversation to happen without the conversation becoming binding. Both sides got something: Elektron gets to be seen engaging without committing, and Piecora gets to report rather than speculate.
The AI half of the agenda is the tell. Elektron’s September announcement cited a surge in custom firmware “much of it apparently AI-assisted” as part of its reasoning. A manufacturer that blames a tooling shift for a support problem has an interest in understanding the tooling. An hour is about how long that takes.
The scene it is responding to has numbers now
While Elektron was deciding how to talk about this, the modding wave stopped being about Elektron at all.
The clearest measure is on a different manufacturer’s hardware. The M-VAVE FM-1 — a pocket FM synth whose maker published its firmware source and SDK on 13 October — now has a community catalogue at thefirmwarehub.com that installs alternate firmwares over USB from a browser. Its maintainer’s 18 October update to the site claims 57 free firmwares from 44 makers; the site’s own static header still reads “Forty firmwares, one FM-1,” because the catalogue is loaded client-side and the headline copy has not caught up. Either number, for one instrument, in five weeks, is remarkable.
The same period produced unofficial firmware for the Arturia MicroFreak (SuperFreaker, now free across all three packs), a mod adding an arpeggiator and polyphonic sequencer to the Sequential Prophet Rev4, a feature mod for the Elektron Model:Cycles, multi-track USB audio on the Octatrack, and an EXTRA FX build for the Roland SP-404MKII. None of it was authorised. Most of it is free. All of it is better documented than it was a year ago.
The two available strategies, side by side
Within five weeks, two manufacturers facing the same pressure picked opposite responses.
| Elektron | M-VAVE | |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting mods | Removed from own forum, 16 Sep | Published source + SDK, 13 Oct |
| Factory restore | Not provided for third-party firmware | One-click revert to factory V15 |
| Licence posture | Closed | GPLv3 with an SDK linking exception |
| Where the scene lives | Elektronmods, a third-party forum | The maker’s own workbench, plus a community hub |
| Public engagement | One hour, off the record, via a YouTuber | A forum and a ten-chapter manual |
M-VAVE’s bet is that a cheap instrument is worth more when strangers keep writing new instruments for it. Elektron’s is that a support burden it cannot test is a liability it should not stand behind. Both are defensible. Only one of them currently requires an intermediary to explain the company’s thinking.
What to watch
Whether anything follows. A briefing that is explicitly not a statement has no commitments in it, which means the only way to tell what it meant is what Elektron does next: a bootloader policy, a published position, a sanctioned mod path, or nothing at all. Machinedrum X remains authorised, which is the one existing precedent for a project the company tolerates by name.
The company’s hardware is not the constraint here. The Octatrack mods, the Model:Cycles mod and the OUTBOX 8 work all demonstrate that the devices have headroom somebody wants. The question is who gets to ship into it.
Sources
- Elektron Responds To Explosion Of Unofficial Firmware — Synthtopia
- I Spoke WIth Elektron About The Hacked Firmware — EZBOT
- The FM-1 Firmware Hub
- 57 Free Firmwares, 44 Creators & Counting — zvenson
- Unofficial Firmware Mod Adds Arpeggiator, Polyphonic Sequencer To Sequential Prophet Rev4 — Synthtopia
- Free Firmware Mod Adds ‘Incredible’ Features To Elektron Model:Cycles — Synthtopia
- M-VAVE FM-1 Open: the green light for custom firmware and community hacks — Synth Anatomy