Plinky 8-voice Polyphonic Touch Synthesizer 2021 Black

The hard to find Plinky! Selling my unit to put towards a drum machine. This will ship with ALL original packaging from Thonk, a few Plinky stickers (yay!), and will of course ship fully insured with tracking provided.

Please see photos for condition; I've also recorded a quick sound demo, as well as a demo of all 3 pots/knobs so you can purchase with confidence (see video in post, full playlist on YouTube)

DESCRIPTION

Plinky churns out warm-yet-fragile, CS80-meets-the-finest-finnish-melodic-electronica sounds. Every finger press is interpreted by old-school analog capacitive touch plates, polyphonically modulating the digital sound with analog sensitivity. Its lush built in reverb & capable arpeggiator mean you can lose hours to just noodling around – with no other gear than a pair of headphones and a USB power pack. Its intense modulation possibilities (full 90×7 mod matrix with internal accelerometer! 90 sample and holds per voice!) and eurorack connectivity mean it’s as deep as it is fun.

When standalone, Plinky is powered from a USB Micro B socket, with line level audio in, and headphone out on both top and bottom edges of the unit.

Or, just unscrew it from its back plate and place it in your eurorack case, with built-in eurorack power connector and 16 CV patch points.

Please note that plinky requires a 5v supply from your eurorack case.

The Story of Plinky

Plinky grew out of an experiment to use a distinctly analogue ‘touch’ technology, to control a stack of 32 digital sawtooth oscillators. Together with built-in reverb and delay, the imperfections in the analog touch data are turned into an advantage, by detuning the unison oscillators in a way that makes you feel really ‘connected’ to the sound. This combination of physical expressiveness and digital sound generation is what makes plinky a unique yet fun instrument.

The 8 voices are mapped directly to the 8 vertical columns of the touch plate. Think of it almost like 8 monosynths, stacked from left to right, with each controlled by the pressure and position of your finger in each column.

Plinky gives you a choice of 4×8 sawtooth oscillators, 2×8 ROM wavetable oscs, or 4×8 granular samplers using samples that you can record into its 32MB sample memory.

It also adds a per-voice noise source, two ADSR envelopes per voice, a global overdrive and reverb and delay units.

The pressure of each finger is mapped to the cutoff of a dedicated 2 pole resonant low-pass gate per voice, giving real-time control over the timbre of each voice.

It can also be used as an FX unit to process live audio, or as a sequencer or arpeggiator to drive other eurorack voices using its 1 V/Oct pitch outputs.

Unlike a raw oscillator, plinky expects to be played (either live, or via its built-in sequencer). However it has CV inputs for both pitch and gate, which allow it to be transposed and gated, as part of a larger modular patch. By switching on the latch and sustaining a single note, you could use it as a voice, arpeggiator, FX unit, sequencer, or any combination of those.

As well as the two envelopes per voice, it has 4 LFOs, a powerful arpeggiator and 64 step sequencer, with many parameters including euclidean rhythms. It has non-volatile storage built in, for 24 patterns, 32 presets and 8 sample slots of 1 minute each. Each sample can be time-stretched, pitched, and sliced into 8 pieces, including ‘key-split’ multi-sample playback.

Even when used standalone, it integrates with modular synths with its 8 CV inputs and 8 CV outputs, including clock, pitch, gates and triggers.

Two ‘performance knobs’ act as macro controls (offsetting the A and B CV inputs), that can be arbitrarily routed to morph any number of parameters.

A third ‘encoder’ knob makes it easy to make fine adjustments while playing. In the performance below, the left knob is mapped to overdrive and the right knob controls the number of octaves the arpeggiator uses:

Each patch can use the knobs any way it likes.

It supports midi in (notes, CC, pitch bend, polyphonic aftertouch, clock) over USB, and will expand its MIDI features in the future with firmware updates.

The module is less than 20mm deep. The kit includes spacers, a back plate and rubber feet, so that it can be used ‘stand alone’. A beautiful custom machined black aluminium case will be available in January 2021.