marvelous
Marvelous is a Mutable Instruments meta synth, of sorts. It’s a descendant of MMM designed by Sluisbrinkie https://www.tindie.com/stores/sluisbrinkie/ Marvelous was designed to keep things simple. It is also a sort of honoring of Mutable Instruments influence on digital foo for eurorack. And the ‘big brother’ of MarvelousMI, my little desktop version of this toy.
Of course, it could be lots of other things :) I’m planning on MI’s elements and clouds but will do some other synths as time goes by.
It runs the 1.2 version of Plaits, Rings and Braids MI docs and can freely switch between them. Marvelous utilizes the arduino ports of Mutable Instruments modules I maintain arduinoMi.
ina rack
Some audio and video samples.
The following are all made with my ’noodle’ providing gates and CV for notes, and my cndlabra providing modulation. Marvelous recieves notes in sync with the drums, my ‘Frame drum’ via noodle and the timing services of ’the rack’.
The video quality is a bit crappy. The audio, less so :)
The first three examples are with MI rings …
Here an example with plaits ….
And finally with braids ….
Technical details
Marvelous is 8hp wide and just under 6hp deep. It consumes approximately 35mA on the positive 12V rail.
Marvelous uses an raspberry pi pico 2 (rp2350) in the form offered by Olimex (Bulgaria) This provides all 8 ADC pins since ALL rp2350 pins are broken out. There is a qwiik/stemma port to allow extending the device, as well as unpopulated pins you could hack.
All controls are via 4 encoders, the meta and parameter encoders, though a number do double duty. See the how-to for details.
The DAC used is a PCM5102a module, running at 16 bit, 48kHz. Inexpensive but reliable.
The CV inputs are very simple voltage deviders with load. Nothing fancy, no buffers.
side
back
Open hardware and sales
I make limited numbers to offer for sale. It will set you back 119 Euro. Batteries not included :) If you are more comfortable with online stores, it’s available at https://tonetoys.etsy.com and at https://www.tindie.com/stores/poetaster/
Or build it yourself with the Open Sources which include fritzing files. You can use the fritzing or Gerber files to produce your own pcbs. If Gerbers are not there, I’m revising errors or improving something. That is also a sign you should not take the fritzing files to production. Look at tags/releases. Or send me a mail!