Steve Duda does not need a side project. He built Serum, the wavetable synth that became close to a default instrument in house, techno and bass production, and he still makes music with deadmau5 as BSOD and WTF?. So when word surfaced on Reddit that he is porting a cut of Serum onto a cheap pocket FM synth, it read, per Synth Anatomy, like it had to be a joke.
It is not. Duda confirmed he is building Shrub, a free wavetable synth firmware for the M-VAVE FM-1, a battery-powered hardware box that M-VAVE opened up to outside developers earlier this month.
What exactly is Shrub?
Per Synth Anatomy's reporting, Duda describes Shrub as a "mini Serum," a port that keeps the core synthesis engine and drops everything else. It carries a 3D wavetable oscillator section, the Serum 2-powered filter with its various modes, two ADSR envelopes and two multi-wave LFOs. On top of that sits a multi-FX chain (distortion, chorus, delay, OTT, reverb), an algorithmic arpeggiator, an 8-lane motion sequencer for animating parameters, and built-in scales. There is no groovebox layer: Duda calls it "synth only."
Why strip Serum down for a $70-class box?
Squeezing a plugin engine built for a computer onto embedded hardware forces real compromises, and Duda was candid about the one that stung most. Shrub does not run a polyphonic filter per voice; instead, every voice mixes down to a single shared stereo filter, with the most recently played note driving its modulation. Players still get a voice-control section with voice count plus per-voice tune and pan. Duda framed the whole project as a straight trade between polyphony and fidelity, and said he picked polyphony.
In return I offer you nothing at all besides the thrill of the brick. It's like a high-stakes hand at Vegas.
How risky is the beta, really?
There is no public beta sign-up page. Per Synth Anatomy, Duda posted the call in his own Reddit thread and is asking people to email him directly at Xfer Records if they want in, with a blunt caveat: Shrub is not built on a fork of existing firmware, so bricking the FM-1 while testing is a genuine risk, not a worst-case disclaimer. He is explicitly after a small group of experienced testers willing to take that risk and report back before the build settles.
The timing is not an accident. The same week Synth Anatomy covered Shrub, M-VAVE pushed an update giving the FM-1 multitimbrality and 20-voice polyphony, part of a growing wave of community and now professional firmware projects built around the device since it opened to outside developers. Duda jumping into that scene, under his own name, is the part other hardware hackers will be watching closest.
No release date or price point beyond "free to download" has been confirmed; Synth Anatomy says more details will follow on Xfer Records' Reddit channel.
