Synthesist Floyd Steinberg shared this in-depth look at MiniDexed, an open-source synth DIY project that lets you run 8 instances of DEXED, a free Yamaha DX7 emulator, on a Raspberry Pi.

The Raspberry Pi is an inexpensive single-board computer platform, created to make computing affordable to almost anyone. The Raspberry Pi 4, like the one used for this project, is available for around $35 USD.

MiniDexed is a FM synthesizer, modeled on the Yamaha DX7, that runs on a bare metal Raspberry Pi (without a Linux kernel or operating system). On Pi Raspberry 2 and larger, it can run 8 tone generators, basically creating an open source equivalent of the TX816/TX802 (8 DX7 instances, without the keyboard, in one box).

Topics covered:

00:00 introduction
01:00 assembling the PI setup (LCD and rotary encoder)
01:32 other hardware needed
02:45 installing and configuring the software
03:30 navigating the menu, setting up a performance
06:34 important considerations
06:54 demo (synthwave… )
09:36 bye-bye

For more details, see the resources shared with Steinberg’s video and the MiniDexed site on Github.