Hey all,
This is Tresse — 3-voice polyphonic desktop synth, 38 engines, USB + BLE MIDI + DIN/TRS
Been working on this one for a while and it’s finally at a point where I want to share it. Tresse is a standalone polyphonic synthesizer built around Mutable Instruments’ Plaits DSP, running on an ESP32-S3 with a custom PCB. Three voices of polyphony, 38 synthesis engines, USB and Bluetooth MIDI, and enough hands-on controls to actually play the thing without getting lost in menus.
The idea was simple — take the full Plaits engine set, make it polyphonic in a self-contained hardware instrument, then keep going and add more engines on top.
HARDWARE:
ESP32-S3 doing all the DSP across both cores in parallel. PCM5102A DAC with 24-bit output. 4 pots and 4 rotary encoders through a CD74HC4067 mux and MCP23017 expander. OLED display for patch info and navigation. Custom PCB design under the Våld Labs name.
ENGINES:
The first 24 come from Plaits — East Coast, Phase Distortion, all three DX7 variants, Terrain, String/Chords, Chiptune, Wavetable, Speech, Swarm, Particle, both Rings modes, three drum engines, the whole library.
Then 14 custom engines built from scratch:
Karplus-Strong with excitation morphing from noise through impulse to tonal. ByteBeat with 8 classic formulas and pitch-tracked rate. CZ Phase Distortion in the Casio style with three distortion shapes. Supersaw with up to 7 detuned oscillators and PWM. Formant vowel synthesis with 3 bandpass resonators and gender shift. 2-Op FM with 13 ratios and operator feedback. Wavefolder with multiple source waveforms and bias control. Noise Drums through an SVF with pitch envelope, covers everything from kicks to metallic hits. Modal Resonator with 8 tuned partials that morph from harmonic to bell to bar, plus a bowed mode. Sympathetic Strings using 3 coupled delay lines with controllable coupling. Comb Resonator with 4 parallel combs and spread. Drawbars for organ-style additive with Hammond ratios. Complex Oscillator running FM into a wavefolder, Buchla-adjacent territory. Grain Noise for textures and evolving pads.
CONTROLS:
Three parameter layers on toggle buttons — Normal gives you Timbre, Morph, Harmonics, Color on the pots with Attack, Decay, FM, and LFO on the encoders. MOD layer gives you Fold, Detune, Ring Mod, Chorus plus full LFO routing. SHIFT layer is the filter section and vibrato/portamento controls.
Hold both buttons for engine select. Double-tap MOD for the system menu. Double-tap SHIFT to browse presets across three banks.
Play modes include Poly, Mono, and chord voicing in Major, Minor, 7th, Sus4, Power, and Octave.
The randomizer generates patches with procedural names like “Velvet Moth” or “Iron Shard” — scroll through with the encoder, save the ones you like. 512 slots for generated presets, 512 for branches, 128 for your own.
HOW IT SOUNDS:
Covers a lot of ground honestly. The Plaits engines already go from classic analog to FM to physical modeling to noise, and the custom engines fill in the gaps — proper supersaw, real string modeling, modal and sympathetic resonance for metallic evolving tones, ByteBeat for full chaos. Global FX chain with filter, wavefolder, ring mod, and chorus ties it all together.
This is a Våld Labs project, made in Lisbon, Portugal.
More to come!
Happy to answer any questions about the build.
Demo with Engine Rings Inharmonic engine #19 and short demo of the Randomizer and Preset menu.