Plinky – DIY Kit#
Plinky v3 – DIY Kit#
Polyphonic touch synthesizer#
Plinky is an 8 voice expressive polyphonic touch synthesizer that specializes in fragile, melancholic sounds, designed by mmalex.
Think of it as an eight stringed instrument, with eight vertical monophonic strips. You can play it straight away on its 64 main pads.
Each of the eight strings has 4 oscillators or sampler grains, detuned by the touch of your fingers, white noise, two ADSR envelopes and a resonant 2-pole low-pass gate.
Plinky also has a global delay, reverb, high pass filter and saturation along with a simple mixer, arpeggiator, sequencer and sampler.
It supports four external CV modulation sources, each with their own LFO.
Plinky was released in 2021, then hit hard by the chip crisis. In coordination with Plinky’s creator mmalex, Making Sound Machines and Thonk are bringing back Plinky as an improved, beginner-friendly full DIY Kit.
Plinky v3 integrates TRS MIDI input and output directly on-board, so you sequence polyphonic chords externally and play a melodic line on top on its touch surface.
The revision also upgrades to USB-C, optimizes the build experience, and introduces improvements to the audio path.
Best of all, Plinky is open source, with improvements and contributions from the Plinky community and PCB contributions from Making Sound Machines, TiNRS, Okyeron and LPZW.