Introducing FRIZZ 1.5 [Chompi custom firmware]

The Lounge Other Gear
1

Edit:

FRIZZ 1.5 is out!

Hey everyone, the next big FRIZZ release is here. What’s new since 1.0:

Your own loops: thirty banks of them from the card. Switch between them on the beat, jump to a fill and straight back, crossfade two loops, and save what you just recorded to the card, right from the CHOMPI. The Companion cuts loops from your songs, right in the browser.

A finalizer for the whole mix: loud without clipping, a three-band EQ, compression that adds density, and width that opens up even a mono synth while the bass stays in the middle.

USB sound card: record FRIZZ straight into your DAW, or run your computer’s tracks through its effects. No driver needed on Windows and Linux.

New sounds: a frequency shifter for barber-pole sweeps and bell-like metal, a crusher that breaks up when you dig in, new slicer rhythms (Euclidean ones and a clave too), a cleaner filter, a smoother reverb, and fewer clicks.

Tighter sync: a loop recorded to a MIDI clock comes out exactly its bars long, and a clock over TRS keeps its time even with lots of other MIDI on the cable.

Coming from 1.0? Your scenes and settings carry over, but the old master compressor’s settings don’t, so copy your FRIZZ folder first if you might go back. If you’ve mapped a controller or DAW to 1.0, check what moved in MIDI (it’s in the changelog).

New home: FRIZZ now lives at FRIZZ, a free live looper and effects firmware for the CHOMPI, with downloads, the manual, the changelog and the Companion. PUMPWERKER is meant to become the home for more CHOMPI firmwares over time.

Next up, 1.6: loops that follow your drum machine’s tempo like tape, sets of banks, and previewing a loop on headphones before it comes in.

Original:

Hi all,

I’ve been working on a custom firmware for the CHOMPI for a while, and today it reached 1.0, so it’s time to show it in a dedicated topic.

I love the CHOMPI’s keys and tape character, but I wanted it to sit in my setup as a looper and effects box that runs in time with everything else.

What it does

FRIZZ turns the CHOMPI into a stereo looper and performance effects box. You catch a loop from AUX (or the built-in mic), hold a white key to throw an effect over it, and let go to snap back. There are 13 effects on the keys: freezer, pitch shifter, folder, crusher, filter, flanger, phaser, resonator, slicer, wow & flutter, tape stop, delay and reverb. The four knobs shape whatever you touched last, and a press flips them to a second page with Mix, Band and Level.

The part I enjoy most is changing the whole sound in time:

  • Four scenes hold every effect’s settings.
  • You can morph to a scene over a few bars, or crossfade between two scenes by hand on the transport knob. Yes, the Octatrack’s crossfader was the inspiration.
  • You can also drop a scene hard on the next bar line, after a build-up if you like.
  • A chaos key drops your latched effects in and out on random steps of the beat, so a static loop starts to move by itself.

The transport knob plays the loop in semitones, from double speed down through a standstill and into reverse, which turns a loop into a melody or a dying tape quickly.

With Elektron boxes and a DAW

  • FRIZZ follows a MIDI clock over TRS (Type A) or USB, and can start and stop with your sequencer.
  • It can also send its own clock and transport, so a Digitakt can follow a loop you just played in.
  • Every effect has its own MIDI channel with the same CCs, which makes automating it from a DAW or a sequencer’s CC tracks straightforward.
  • AUX can bypass the effects entirely, so a drum machine plays dry through the CHOMPI while you mangle its loop.

Trying it

With the community’s multi-firmware launcher, FRIZZ sits on its own key next to TAPE, TEMPO and WAVE, so you don’t give anything up: pick it at power-on, and the CHOMPI setup page installs it from the browser. Without the launcher, you copy FRIZZ.bin to the card, and going back to stock works the same way.

I’d love to hear how it works in your setups, and which features you’d want next. Bug reports are welcome here or on GitHub.

Thanks to CHOMPI Club for opening up the code, and to the launcher folks for making it easy to have several firmwares on one card.

3 Likes
2

is there anywhere a mark that it is vibe coded or in any way with help of AI agents?

1 Like
3

The code is in a Github repository with very verbose comments and a CLAUDE.md file so I guess it’s heavily AI supported.

Doesn’t mean it won’t work though.

1 Like
4

Fair question, and yes: FRIZZ is built with heavy help from AI coding agents (Claude Code). I should have said so up front. The README now has a section on how FRIZZ is made, and you can also see it in the commit history, where most commits are co-authored by Claude.

I know vibe coding is flooding the internet right now, and it’s getting really hard to tell what’s solid and what isn’t. At the same time, it’s what lets me build my product vision at all. My routine: in the evening I define the plan, Claude works through it overnight, and in the little time I have during my parental leave I test it on the CHOMPI and feed what I find back in. For some features I’ve gone through a lot of UI rounds, because it matters to me that the whole thing feels right in your hands.

In practice, nothing gets in on trust alone:

  • a virtual CHOMPI runs the whole firmware on a computer and holds it to about 2,700 individual checks in 35 test programs (keys, LEDs, MIDI, timing, the SD card, the audio), plus 31 scenarios played from power-on
  • every change runs on the real CHOMPI too, with its CPU load measured, before it’s merged
  • every release is played and tested by me by ear and hand, with real gear, before it goes out (the release-test checklists are public in the GitHub issues)

So yes: the firmware is AI-assisted, but it’s judged, tested and decided by a human. It’s all open source (MIT), so anyone can read the code, the tests and the discussion behind every decision in the issues and pull requests. If you run into anything odd, I’d love to hear about it.

3 Likes
5

FRIZZ 1.5 is out!

Hey everyone, the next big FRIZZ release is here. What’s new since 1.0:

Your own loops: thirty banks of them from the card. Switch between them on the beat, jump to a fill and straight back, crossfade two loops, and save what you just recorded to the card, right from the CHOMPI. The Companion cuts loops from your songs, right in the browser.

A finalizer for the whole mix: loud without clipping, a three-band EQ, compression that adds density, and width that opens up even a mono synth while the bass stays in the middle.

USB sound card: record FRIZZ straight into your DAW, or run your computer’s tracks through its effects. No driver needed on Windows and Linux.

New sounds: a frequency shifter for barber-pole sweeps and bell-like metal, a crusher that breaks up when you dig in, new slicer rhythms (Euclidean ones and a clave too), a cleaner filter, a smoother reverb, and fewer clicks.

Tighter sync: a loop recorded to a MIDI clock comes out exactly its bars long, and a clock over TRS keeps its time even with lots of other MIDI on the cable.

Coming from 1.0? Your scenes and settings carry over, but the old master compressor’s settings don’t, so copy your FRIZZ folder first if you might go back. If you’ve mapped a controller or DAW to 1.0, check what moved in MIDI (it’s in the changelog).

New home: FRIZZ now lives at FRIZZ, a free live looper and effects firmware for the CHOMPI, with downloads, the manual, the changelog and the Companion. PUMPWERKER is meant to become the home for more CHOMPI firmwares over time.

Next up, 1.6: loops that follow your drum machine’s tempo like tape, sets of banks, and previewing a loop on headphones before it comes in.

6

i dont have one but these features seem like a good update breathing new life into it.

1 Like