About

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

Building upon Kinga’s experience in the field performing live techno, Pushpin seeks to marry the power of the award-winning open-source Surge XT soft-synth with the form-factor of the Ableton Push 2.

Features

• Eight fully-featured synth tracks (one instance of Surge XT per track)
• Expressive, performance-driven sequencer
• 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

What is it?

Pushpin is a Python application that builds heavily upon Frederick Font’s Pysha project 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.

Synth engine (Surge XT) specifications

• 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 process external audio or use tracks as sends