About

Pushpin is an open-source groovebox project by improvisational electronic musician Kinga Janicka.

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Building upon Kinga’s experience in the field performing live improvised techno, Pushpin seeks to marry the versatility of the award-winning open-source Surge XT soft-synth with the form-factor of the Ableton® Push® 2, powered as a standalone unit by Raspberry Pi® 5.

Features

  • Eight fully-featured synth tracks (one instance of Surge XT per track)
  • Dynamic instrument routing directly from the Ableton® Push® 2 for longer effect chains, sends and master effects
  • Overwitch support built-in for routing Elektron® Overbridge 2-compatible devices
  • Designed to be used without a laptop on a Raspberry Pi® 5
  • Attach a screen to see each Surge instance at a glance (coming soon)
  • Customise Pushpin’s layout using a simple JSON-based format
  • Use any Surge XT preset or patch
  • Built to be extensible and easily fork-able

What is it?

Pushpin is a Python application that builds heavily upon Frederick Font’s open source Pysha framework by creating an interface for communicating with Surge XT via the Open Source Control (OSC) standard, using a standard Ableton® Push® 2. It controls 8 instances of Surge XT, and sequences them via either external or built-in sequencer (coming soon).

This allows an enormous degree of creative expression, with Surge’s powerful modules accessible in a ergonomic layout that’s optimised for live performance.

For the cost of an Ableton® Push® 2, a Raspberry Pi 5 and an audio interface, you can have a fully-featured groovebox with powerful features rivalling the most expensive devices on the market. Even better, with a little bit of Python knowledge you can hack it to do literally anything you can dream of.

Surge XT specifications

Pushpin runs a separate instance of Surge XT per instrument track. This means that each instrument track is capable of:

  • Two oscillators, two filters and three insert FX per track
  • 12 oscillator types
  • 12 filter types
  • 29 effect types
  • Six assignable LFOs/envelopes per track
  • Extensive modulation matrix
  • Ability to use tracks as sends

“Raspberry Pi” is a trademark of Raspberry Pi Ltd. “Ableton” and “Ableton Push” are trademarks of Ableton AG. “Elektron” is a trademark of Elektron Music Machines MAV AB. All trademarks used with permission. Nothing on this page is intended to imply any association with the aforementioned trademark holders.