August 8, 2026

Putting the synth under version control

By admin · 1 min read

The synth existed for a while before it had a history.

What forced it was the hardware. Once fourteen encoders hang off I2C expanders, losing a working firmware to one careless edit stops being a theoretical risk and starts being a Tuesday.

This is the baseline everything since has been built on. The engine, as it stood:

  • Eight-voice polyphonic, three oscillators per voice
  • State variable filter and envelope generators
  • A Teensy 4.0 — Cortex-M7 at 600 MHz — doing all of it

That is a lot of DSP for a microcontroller. Most of what I have done since has been protecting it from everything else the chip wants to do.

On a Teensy, the audio engine is almost never the problem. The problem is whatever else wants the same clock cycles.

Notes on the build so far are on the project page.