Arduino Piano Squealer Synth
This page is dedicated to a synth engine, “The Arduino Piano Squealer”, that I developed for the Arduino Pocket Piano, an arduino shield produced by Critters and Guitari.
Features
The engine implements a small monosynth with a few waveforms, a HP/BP/LP continuous resonant filter, decay and a few little own tricks that generate a LOT of aliases, making a great dirty digital synth.
Since the Pocket Piano has only 3 potentiometers available for control (the 4th one being hardwired to the volume), I use a “page” system to implement series of 3 parameters to fiddle with. To switch “page”, use the rightmost note of the A.P (NOT the one under the led, the one left to to it).
To help you know which page you are at, you can use the led: it will flash a number of time equivalent to the current page you are at.
Here’s the parameter list:
- Page 1: wave selection / octave / release
- Page 2: filter type (continuous lp-bp-hp) / filter cut-off / filter resonance
- Page 3: wave loop position / wave loop length (makes the oscillators go wako)
Please also note that when you switch page, the parameters of that page will automatically jump to the current setting of the knobs. It provides some kind of auto-randomization that is actually quite nice.
Sound samples
Here’s a collection of sounds I accumulated when building the engine. You can also go through all my earlier post on the topic through this link.
SAP+BOM+Dodgey Eighties Ringing Reverb:
Download
The source code of the Arduino Piano Squealer synth is available under GPL License V3, hoping it will help people tapping in the wonderful world of arduino based sound. Alternatively, it’ll also make another synth, ready to to play with if you just purchased the A.P. from C & G.
You can download the source code, right here
Enjoy,
Marc Nostromo – 2009
