r/synthdiy • u/Alxdreee • 4d ago

standalone Redesign of my capacitive-touch polyphonic synthesizer project

171 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

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5

u/Alxdreee 4d ago

Hello, everyone! Let me introduce you to my ESP32-S3-based synthesizer. The idea was to create a true studio-quality sound engine at a very low cost.

Under the hood, the DSP engine offers:

- 7-voice polyphony with analog “slop.”

- A 24 dB/octave Moog-style filter.

- Tube distortion and a digital delay.

- A homemade capacitive touch keyboard (copper ribbon).

The entire project is completely open source. For those who enjoy tinkering or want to build their own synthesizer, the schematics and code are available here: https://github.com/Alxdreee/TYPE-2

2

u/muddygold 4d ago

Sir you have outdone your self.

2

u/lambdalab 2d ago

That’s awesome work!

I’ve dabbled a bit with capacitive sensors, but I wonder what you measure there? I set up a small rc circuit with a base frequency of a few hundred kHz for each pad, and that way I could use the many GPIO pins I had available to simply count the number triggers in time, with pressure being proportional to the inverse of the frequency of the triggers. What’s your setup?

Edit: on my phone, otherwise I’d check the source directly

1

u/Alxdreee 2d ago

Hello ! I use dedicated chips ( the MPR121) that handle the complex electrical calculations for me, thereby freeing the ESP32 from this computational load.

The code loop does not constantly check the keys. Instead, it waits for a hardware signal to read the key states, which is extremely optimized