I’m not a hacker, but I was searching about hacking keyboard instruments and I got nothing besides DIY modular synths and vintage synth mods. Here’s what I mean. Take Roland FP-E50 digital piano. Beyond piano sounds, it features many other kinds of sounds, but you can’t edit and save presets like a synth. Roland runs a paid service where you can download sounds and upload it to the FP-E50, so it’s like a game console, where you can run only licensed games. But here’s the thing: FP-E50 runs the Zen-core engine, the same one in the Jupiter-X, Juno-X, Fantom workstations and the Zenology soft synth. So the FP-E50 could play presets edited on those other synths, and since it plays official wave expansions from Roland Cloud, it probably could play wave files created by the user and function like a sampler, but Roland made it to run underpowered in order to have players rellying solely on the content they sell.

So I wondered, people hack almost every type of computer device, but what about modern synthesizers, workstations, other keyboard instruments, grooveboxes, etc.? There are so many possibilities. In the example I used, people could add on-board preset editing, compatibility to other file formats, overhaul the interface, assign MIDI values to buttons and faders, add new effects, increase layering and splitting, add the option to downgrade sound quality in order to increase polyphony, hell, people could run Doom on its LCD screen and play it with the keys, or run Android or Debian on it.

There should be a synth hacking scene, but I found nothing.