™What it will be
An instrument that does it all
The model is the do-everything workstations of the 1980s: one machine that holds the sounds, plays them on many channels at once, mixes them and sequences them. Tymbal is not a modular synthesizer. Its engines are fixed and carefully built, and a patch combines them freely, under a modulation matrix where every continuous parameter is a destination.
When audio quality, flexibility and voice count pull against each other, quality wins, then flexibility. Voice count gives way first.
- Virtual analogFive oscillators with detuned copies, sync, a chopped saw, organ drawbars and recordings, into state-variable and ladder filters.
- FMCarrier and modulator pairs in the manner of the Synclavier, each pair a voice of its own that a patch layers with the rest.
- AdditiveA bank of partials, fed by an offline resynthesis tool that analyzes a recording.
- ModalStruck and bowed strings, bars, membranes, plates and tubes, from tables of their modes.
- WaveguideBlown and bowed instruments, with a bore and a jet.
- Particles and noiseStochastic and unvoiced sounds, for cymbals, breath and texture.
- Effects as layersChorus, long delay, plate, room and hall reverb with freeze, phaser, frequency shifter, rotary speaker and three kinds of EQ.
- A consoleThirty-two channels and a master over one shared pool of voices, each strip with an EQ, a compressor, sends and a sidechain.
- A workstationA mixer, a song sequencer with a note editor, a patch editor, and MIDI and MPE from any port.
Every sample is computed in fixed point, with no floating point, no allocation and no indirect calls on the audio path. That is what lets the same design become hardware, and every hardware module is checked bit for bit against the software it came from.
Where it stands
Not finished, and honest about it
Tymbal is a work in progress, developed in the open. Much of it works today on a Linux computer; the hardware is being built a piece at a time.
On a computer
Working
The engines, the thirty-two channel console, the sequencer and the patch editor run together as one workstation program on Linux. It plays, but it does not yet reach the voice count it is meant for.
On a development board
In progress
The virtual analog engine runs in the fabric of an Agilex 5 FPGA on a Terasic DE25-Standard, played from a USB keyboard through the board's own processor. The other engines follow, one build at a time.
The whole instrument
Planned
Every engine in one build, on a larger Agilex 5 board, with its own audio hardware and the workstation running on the board itself.
Follow along
There is nothing to download yet. The source, the design documents and the issue tracker are on Forgejo, and the software builds from source on Linux with Bazel.
View the project on Forgejo