Alex Evans has been working on Plinky, a DIY polyphonic instrument with multi touch control and a beautiful reverb heavy sound.

 

Inspired by the immediacy of Teenage Engineering’s Pocket Operators, Evans set out to make a small synth using a Teensy 3.6, capacitive touch and a LEDs. The synth’s sound was made up of 32 sawtooth waves going into 32 low pass filters in groups of four unison voices with stereo delay and an extra long reverb.

This luscious sounding synth has been a side project for Evans since 2018, who used it to learn about and experiment with a number of different technologies, including Teensy, capacitive touch, PCB design and STM chips. Evans has documented this journey over on his Twitter account, where he shared a collection of his disappointments, successes and learning in a long thread that is really worth reading.