Install (one click) · Play it in your browser · thebigbeat.app/compas

Compás: que suene el grupo.

Cumbia, salsa, merengue and bolero. Compás turns the FM-1 into the rhythm section: drums, bass, hand percussion and a 727 full of bongos and congas. You call the sections. The band waits for the phrase, counts you in and lands together.

            1 . . . 2 . . . 3 . . . 4 . . .  1 . . . 2 . . . 3 . . . 4 . . .
  CLAVE     ■ · · · · · ■ · · · · · ■ · · ·  · · · · ■ · · · ■ · · · · · · ·   3-2 son
  CONGA     ■ · · · ■ · ■ · · · ■ · ■ · ■ ·  ■ · · · ■ · ■ · · · ■ · ■ · ■ ·
  BASS      · · · · · · ■ · · · · · ■ · · ·  · · · · · · ■ · · · · · ■ · · ·   anticipated

The salsa study as it plays: two bars of sixteenths, straight from the firmware.

What's in the box


Band	Six song parts on the center white keys. A part waits for the phrase; the horn counts down the beats. ALGORITHM moves the energy: base, lift or break.
Bass	Ensemble lines for every style, or flip to Acid. Tone and Bite under your fingers.
Percussion	Conga, maraca, timbal and bell, each in and out on your call.
727	Fifteen sounds on the pads: bongos, congas, timbales, agogó, cabasa, maracas, whistles, quijada and star chime. 29 complete rhythms on PRESETS, 22 percussion parts in the step editor, live REC and roll.
KUMBIA	Four Hanan Cumbia pads and four factory patterns. Cue a pattern with keys 5–8. Use FX to layer the kit over a Compás groove, and K1–K4 for drive, decay, pitch and sample clock. See the Kumbia Kit quick guide.
29 groove studies	Colombian coast, Barranquilla and Soledad; Mexico City sonidera, Monterrey, Puebla and tribal guarachero; Lima, Buenos Aires and Chile; salsa and son with the clave the right way round; merengue derecho and maco; bolero, tejano and conjunto.
28 written songs	La Paloma, La Golondrina, Cielito Lindo, La Cucaracha, Siboney, El Manisero and more, arranged from their printed editions, with the melody guide and transpose.
Rebajada	Slow the whole band to 60 %, pitch and all, the way Monterrey's sound systems played their 45s at 33.
The set list	Sixteen songs in your order. PRESETS cues the next song any time; it lands on the boundary.
Take it away	A tribute to Johnny Canales, who started his show in Corpus Christi in 1983 and handed the stage to Tejano, conjunto and regional Mexican bands across the United States and Mexico.

Get it on your FM-1

Compás has been tested on real M-VAVE FM-1 units.

Plug the FM-1 into a computer with a USB data cable and open thebigbeat.app/compas/install in Chrome or Edge.
Press Install Compás once.
With MASTER down, press PLAY. Bring MASTER up gently.

To return to stock, use the matching original M-VAVE firmware package. The offline release checks verified stock-loader staging. End-to-end stock restoration remains unverified in the emulator.

Try before you flash: the browser player runs the Compás firmware itself: the same screen, the same band.

Controls in ten seconds

  PLAY ················· start and stop; the band counts you in
  center white keys ···· song parts: intro, verse, chorus, bridge, break, ending
  ALGORITHM ············ energy for the next phrase: base · lift · break
  SELECT ··············· Band · Bass · Percussion · 727 · KUMBIA
  PRESETS ·············· the next song, any time
  GLO ·················· the set list
  FX ··················· mix and REBAJADA, or kit mode on KUMBIA
  REC ·················· the 727 pads
  four knobs ··········· always do what the bottom of the screen says

Licence

GNU GPL v3. See LICENSE and LICENSING.md. Compás is a Felucca-family firmware; upstream notices are kept in LICENSING.md, with the sources and licences of the arranged printed editions. M-VAVE, FM-1, Roland and TR-727 are trademarks of their respective owners. Compás is independent and not affiliated with or endorsed by them. No warranty: you install it at your own risk.

Build from source

See BUILDING.md for the source revision, bundled inputs and offline build commands.