Make Noise designed the Morphagene in their Asheville, North Carolina workshop as a follow-up to the 2013 Phonogene. The first production run shipped in early 2017 with firmware 1.0 that included the original “Gene” slicing engine.
Alessandro Cortini integrated early units into his live rig for the 2018 album “Avanti,” using the module’s real-time splicing to process field recordings. Make Noise issued firmware 1.1 later that year after users reported buffer overrun issues on longer samples.
Early silver-face panels from the first 500 units command a premium today because the faceplate lettering wore off faster than later black versions. No major hardware revisions followed, so the cult status stems more from the steep patch-learning curve than from scarce variants.
