The news by Behringer announcing the Kick open source drum sampler, and a DJ system with the same idea, quickly followed by Akai announcing that their Sample keys will also be open source (and probably the sample) has got me thinking.
We have also had a lot of reversed engineering on older machines from Akai S series sampler all the way to not so old gear from Elektron, all given new OS systems or firmware.
Cool right, on a first glance this may be the dream. If you think of a function or feature you can just add it. Or if you find a bug you can just fix it yourself and share it. Everything will go a lot faster.
(Open source) engineering your own ideas
But wasn’t this possible all along? Nobody would stop you if you wanted to build your own custom instrument, whether it be a sampler from scratch or working on building your own instruments in PureData, Supercollider or Max MSP and connecting it with a controller or building your own system from the ground up.
The thing has always been that this was pretty hard to do, not everyone has the time, energy or knowledge to start a project like this. The other part is, when developing your own ideas, these might not lead to the best device for you. You can only think of so much.
Even if you are an (software) engineer by trade you might not want to be bothered with (vibe) coding your own OS for all your devices, let alone firmwares.
You might just want to spent a night with a machine and make music. and take its quirks for granted. Working with machines designed by other people might give you a whole new range of ideas you might not have had when solely developing your own gear.
So this has always been possible, just not many people had the abundance of energy to go for it.
Design is important, and needs to be integral
A lot of devices start from a certain design esthetic, workflow idea or other main starting point. With hardware it’s not just building a nice box with buttons, thinking about how these interface with the software is very important to the success of the idea. It’s not two worlds apart.
Even if the layout is designed well, software design and making a great combination of hard and software requires more than just coding features. It’s thinking ahead when designing the hardware, it’s the total philosophy of the device. Workflow and all. Otherwise you would just end up with a controller and an empty computer and off you go.
So while these new developments seem great at a first glance, this might just lead to a load of not very well thought out boxes with a starting point for an OS and limited further development. And hopefully a community that drives the thing forward. A rather big gamble.
How many people who do not want to be an engineer in their free time and just want to make music, will be put off by this sudden influx of the “freedom of open source”. Even if you can vibe code the whole thing?
Doesn’t it undermine the whole concept of building well thought out instruments and technologies focussed on musicians that just want to learn a device and get on with making music? Do we really need all this perceived freedom? Limits are part of the creative process, and move ideas forward as much as endless possibilities.
Why do it?
We all know the feeling of buying an instrument and keep getting stuck in bugs, features that do not work and feel unfinished. Then over time, bug & feature requests hopefully lead towards new and improved software. Some companies do this pretty well and others die while trying. This can be very frustrating if you have one of these unfinished and abandoned products. So we could argue that open sourcing would be able to fix this.
On the flip side, companies can already use AI to improve the software development process and deliver bug fixes faster and ship with less bugs in the first place, so why bother open sourcing it? Just incorporate it into your development.
Less is more
Back to the bright side, features. Why not just let everyone develop their own ideas and work on features, so we can all benefit from it? Well keeping the integrity of an idea and workflow also means not developing some feature requests as the get in the way of the workflow, the core of what an instrument needs to do. Less is truly more. We all have software like Ableton where we only use a part of, there is a reason not everyone goes for large open ended systems like Max MSP, Supercollider or PureData. It’s too much. Too many options, too many ideas that can be crammed into one system. Design is also about restraint. Developing something with limits so people can get creative with them.
If you want to develop your own instruments with loads of features, you can, even more so in this day and age of AI. Why should manufacturers of instruments build open ended boxes?
Build it! From scratch
I am very in favor of open source, engineering your own tools and designing cool stuff. Especially now this is more accessible than ever before. With AI, workshops on engineering, printing and manufacturing small batches being readily available. But it is still hard, you need to work on skills and work on a design philosophy and set limits at some point. If you want to do that, do it build stuff from scratch.
For the pure joy of making music, I think getting your hands on a few well build and well designed pieces of gear is the way to go. So we need company’s that have that design philosophy, do the hard part and develop, maintain and bring those ideas further. Otherwise we all be stuck in our own minds and my bet is there will be a lot less cool instruments if we let everything go in an early stage and not do the hard work.