OLD SOUL. NEW MACHINE. HUMANS IN COMMAND.
Natural-language tone control for the Fractal FM9: type "give me a Van Halen Balance era tone with the flanger on the expression pedal", review the exact parameter changes it proposes, confirm, and they land on the hardware over USB MIDI with read-back verification.
One sentence, one freshly erased FM9 slot, and six minutes later a complete eight-scene Judas Priest preset stands on the hardware: signal chain wired from nothing, amps voiced per era, scenes named on the footswitches, stored under its own name. Unedited, on a real unit.
Bring your own AI: pick ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, Kimi, a subscription you already pay for, or a model on your own laptop by name in the settings panel, or use the Claude CLI it finds on its own. ToneCommand translates, verifies against the real unit, and keeps every write behind your confirmation (docs/AI-BACKENDS.md).
The short list of what it does, so you do not have to read the changelog release by release.
Build and design
- Build a complete multi-scene rig from one sentence: signal chain, amp per scene role, cab, drives, effects, scenes named on the footswitches.
- Asks a few clarifying questions first on an open-ended build (era, scenes, how heavy), then builds; builds straight away when you are specific.
- Live scene preview: the eight-scene grid fills in as you talk the build through, so you can spot a gap ("nothing in scene 8 yet") before it is built.
- Adjust the loaded tone in plain language: "a bit more presence", "tighten the gate for drop C", "make scene 1 a dry crunch".
Move sound between presets
- Copy an effect from another preset onto yours, aligned by scene not just by channel ("make the delay like that tone's").
- Compose a preset from parts of several: clone one whole tone, then pull the delay from another and the reverb from a third.
- Reorder blocks into the correct signal-chain order (delay before reverb, drive before the amp), signal path proven intact.
Hands-on control
- Per-block manual controls: amp and cab, EQ, effects, with -/+ fine-tune on every slider.
- Bind the expression pedal (wah, delay mix) under Pedal 2.
- Scenes: rename, per-scene bypass and channel, A/B compare, and undo.
Get and keep presets
- Install artist presets and cabs from Fractal's Gift of Tone.
- Store only to slots you have marked disposable, and only after you confirm.
Safety and trust
- Read-back verification on every write, and a signal-path check so a preset is never silently dead.
- A "what will change" blast-radius preview before anything is sent, including every other scene a channel-level change would move.
- Gig lock: mid-performance, only scene changes reach the amp.
- Bring your own AI: ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, a local model, or the Claude CLI it finds on its own.
- A tone-building rulebook the planner reads and follows on every build.
That is not a slogan. It is the constraint every other decision here bends to.
A language model proposes. It never sends. There is no autonomous mode, no "just do it" flag, and no path from a sentence to your hardware that does not pass through a human reading the exact list of parameter changes first.
The tool refuses more than it does: it refuses to guess a value it cannot ground, to name gear it has not verified, to claim a pedal sweep works when only your foot can prove it, and to store to any preset slot you have not explicitly marked disposable. And before anything is sent, it shows the blast radius: FM9 parameters live on the channel, not the scene, so every other scene a change would quietly move lights up amber and says WILL CHANGE, while there is still time to not do it.
Every verification in this project ends the same way:
ears: pending, always.
A machine reading a wire can prove the signal is alive, the levels are sane and the write landed. It cannot tell you the tone is good. That judgement was never ours to take, and nothing here will pretend otherwise.
Every one of these is a real request the planner resolves into concrete, verified parameter changes, shown to you before anything is sent:
- "give me a Van Halen Balance era tone with the flanger on the expression pedal"
- "a Klon into a JCM800 with a greenback 4x12"
- "tighten the gate for drop C and bump the presence slightly"
- "make scene 1 a dry crunch rhythm and keep the wets in scene 2"
- "put the delay and reverb mix on pedal 2 so I can swell into the chorus"
- "add a subtle octave-down layer like a POG under the lead"
Requests that need facts the project cannot verify get an honest refusal instead of an invented answer.
Everything above is live from a connected FM9; nothing on this page is a mock-up. The full tour is in docs/INTERFACE.md. The short version:
- The routing grid is your actual routing grid, cables and all, with the live path lit. Click a block to bypass it, click its letter to change channel.
- Audition amps and cabs by typing, not by turning a knob through 1024 entries. 331 amps and 2,237 cabs, searchable by what the gear really is.
- A graphic EQ that looks like one: faders standing up, seven starting curves, one click back to flat.
- Honest panels: bypassed blocks are badged, pedal-driven parameters name what drives them, and "verified" is never said about a change you cannot hear.
- Blast radius before every send, a health scan that finds dead and duplicated scenes, undo and A/B the FM9 itself does not have, and saving with the safety catch on: only to slots you listed, never by surprise.
flowchart LR
U["Your words"] --> P["Planner<br/>your AI + facts-only<br/>grounding sidecars"]
P --> V["Safety layer<br/>validation, confirmation,<br/>preset-pinned plans,<br/>store whitelist"]
V -- "approved plan" --> A["Device adapter<br/>contract"]
A --> D["FM9 device layer<br/>SysEx over USB MIDI"]
A --> S["Simulator<br/>models the real quirks"]
D -- "read-back verify" --> V
The planner never touches the wire. It emits a plan in a closed action vocabulary; the safety layer validates every action against grounded catalogs (all 331 amps, 86 drives and 2,235 cab IRs mapped to the real gear they capture, citations and all), pins the plan to the preset it was computed for, and requires your confirmation. Only then does the device layer transmit, and every write is verified by reading the unit back. The simulator sits behind the same adapter contract, so the whole test suite runs without an FM9 attached (ARCHITECTURE.md).
Building it meant decoding parts of the FM9 editor protocol nobody had written down. Those findings are free to any Fractal tool builder in docs/PROTOCOL-CONTRIBUTIONS.md, and the community work this stands on is credited in docs/CREDITS.md.
Rule zero: this tool can never brick a device. It touches only user data, every operation is recoverable by a power cycle and preset reselect, and the transport layer refuses to send any message type outside its decoded, verified surface: firmware and bootloader operations are structurally unreachable, on every device, forever.
- Edit-buffer by default. Changes go where front-panel knob turns go; re-selecting the preset discards everything.
- Confirm before send, and plans are pinned to the preset they were computed against.
- Store is disabled until YOU enable it, via
TONECOMMAND_STORE_SLOTS=133-148(wire numbers; the editor shows 134-149). Nobody but you knows what lives in your banks, so there is no default. - Never touches firmware, system settings, or global setup.
- Back up first anyway. Run a full Fractal-Bot backup before using any third-party MIDI tool, this one included.
Tested on macOS with Python 3.12, FM9 firmware 11.00 and 12.00 (Windows steps are in docs/SETUP.md, untested but expected to work):
git clone https://github.com/monzta1/ToneCommand.git
cd ToneCommand
python3 -m venv .venv
.venv/bin/pip install -e .
.venv/bin/tonecommand
# open http://127.0.0.1:8909 with the FM9 connected and powered onA signed-in Claude Code CLI is found on its own; any other AI is a chip in
the gear menu (docs/AI-BACKENDS.md). To build tones
from YouTube videos, add pip install -e ".[video]" and
brew install ffmpeg (a system dependency; pip cannot install it); details,
testing and FM9-Edit coexistence notes are in docs/SETUP.md.
| docs/SETUP.md | Install, video extras, testing, compatibility matrix |
| docs/AI-BACKENDS.md | ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, Kimi, subscriptions, local models |
| docs/INTERFACE.md | Every panel, with screenshots |
| ARCHITECTURE.md | The adapter contract and the safety layer |
| docs/PROTOCOL.md | The living protocol record, evidence per claim |
| docs/PROTOCOL-CONTRIBUTIONS.md | Original decodes offered back to the community |
| docs/CREDITS.md | Prior work and contributors |
| CHANGELOG.md | Every release, cause alongside fix |
ToneCommand has a Slack: join here. Protocol decodes land in #protocol-decodes with their evidence, the HeadRush port lives in #headrush, and #show-and-tell is for what your rig did on stage.
ToneCommand is free and always will be. If it saved you an evening of preset fiddling, you can buy the maintainer a coffee under his stage name, Shieldbearer. Or wear the thing: the emblem is on a tee and a performance jersey, both carrying the line at the top of this page, which was written for the shirt before it described the software.
Not affiliated with or endorsed by Fractal Audio Systems. Uses a reverse-engineered protocol; may break with firmware updates. Back up your presets. Use at your own risk.
Apache License 2.0 for this project's code. Vendored and derived content carries its own upstream copyrights; see THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.