About

Knobwerk — interactive, LLM-friendly rebuilds of hardware instrument manuals.

This is an unofficial, community project that rebuilds Elektron's user manuals in an interactive form — so "how do I…" and "what does this parameter do" are answered faster than scrolling a PDF. It currently covers the Elektron Tonverk (OS 1.4.0), Syntakt (OS 1.40A), Digitone II (OS 1.10D), and Digitakt II (OS 1.15A).

Everything here is compiled from the official manual by a reproducible pipeline: each procedure, parameter, and MIDI address is extracted into structured data, audited against the source, and rendered as interactive panel demos. Every record cites the manual section it came from.

Why this exists

My Tonverk sat on my desk for months. I'm a complete beginner at synthesizers and electronic music production, and to me it was a beast. On YouTube everyone is cool — casually flicking out a punchy drum groove or a gorgeous phrase. Me, I stared at the manual and got nowhere. It's thick, packed with concepts I'd never heard of, and I didn't know what to do — or even what I should want to do. It's like handing a Phase One medium-format camera to someone who has never shot before: without composition, color, light, or even the basic controls, are you really going to take a good picture?
With AI's help (thank goodness AI is this capable now), I started catching up bit by bit — and still kept getting lost between the manual and the machine's own logic. AI all but deconstructed the entire manual for me, patiently repeating in every answer: press X, turn A, hold C and D together. But cross-referencing those answers against the hardware, back and forth, was painfully slow. That's what sparked this project: an electronic manual where I can at least see, at a glance, how an operation is actually done.
I build it with Claude's Fable model — the strongest coding model I could get my hands on. Luckily I'm a heavy Claude user anyway, so once my own work is done there are plenty of spare tokens to burn here. I hope this manual helps people as confused as I was. One principle holds throughout: everything must come from the original manual, never invented by AI. And since I'm an outsider to music production, I keep my own opinions about making music out of it — the goal is to keep it pure.
The project keeps iterating, slowly but steadily: it has a proper domain now, a much more interactive panel, and multiple languages (need another one? just ask). Several other machines are in too, though the main effort is still the Tonverk — the others aren't at its level of completeness yet. As for open-sourcing it: I haven't decided yet, give me a little time.
I truly hope this project helps someone — people who love electronic music the way I do. Enjoy the music, and enjoy the unbelievable machines Elektron builds.

What's inside

·Procedure player — operations replayed step by step as highlighted keys on a rendered front panel.
·Parameter reference — every parameter by page, track type, and machine, with ranges and MIDI addresses.
·Manual search — full-text search across the compiled manual.
·Web MIDI control — resolve a parameter to its CC/NRPN address and drive the hardware from the browser.
·AI tutor — bring-your-own-key chat grounded in the manual; your key stays in your browser.
·Feedback — report a manual error, bug, or idea in a click; sent via Formspree, no cookies or tracking.

Built with

Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, shadcn/ui, and Web MIDI. The data pipeline is Python.

Data reuse

The hand-authored layers — the deep-dive articles, learning paths, concept explanations, the owner's story, and the Chinese and Japanese translations — are original work of this project. If you reuse them, attribute Knobwerk and link to https://www.knobwerk.com. Please don't republish them wholesale or present them as official Elektron material.

The compiled reference data — manual text, parameter facts, procedures, MIDI addresses — originates from Elektron's official user manuals. This project claims no copyright over Elektron's content and cannot grant reuse rights to it; it is restructured here for interactive reading, with every record citing its manual section. If you build on this project's structuring of that data, attribution with a link is expected; for the underlying content itself, defer to Elektron.

Disclaimer

This is an independent, unofficial project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Elektron Music Machines MAV AB. "Elektron", "Tonverk", and related names are trademarks of their respective owner and are used here only to identify the hardware this guide documents. Always defer to the official manual and your hardware. A note on the name: "Knobwerk" here is simply knob + werk (German for "works"), picked for this documentation project — it is unrelated to any musician or artist who records or performs under the same or a similar name, and no connection or endorsement exists in either direction.