Most expressive instruments ask you to adapt to their layout. Making Sound Machines is trying something different with Plinky 12: keep the hardware identical, swap the panel on top, and let the instrument become a different thing entirely.

Announced at Superbooth 2026 in Berlin, Plinky 12 is a trio of touch-focused instruments that share one core design and one synthesis engine — but arrive in three configurations built, in the company's framing, for different kinds of musical thinking.

The Shared Hardware

Every Plinky 12 is built around the same 12-inch by 12-inch chassis, running on an RP2350 microcontroller. The playing surface is a 16x16 grid of capacitive touch pads, and what those 256 pads actually do is determined entirely by the faceplate mounted over them.

Connectivity is generous for an instrument this size: MIDI and CV I/O, stereo unbalanced audio in and out, and USB. The audio input matters more than it might look — it means Plinky can process external material through its engine rather than only generating its own.

The original Plinky established the concept: an eight-voice polyphonic touch synthesizer where finger position and pressure shape the sound continuously, with no keys and no discrete note boundaries. Plinky 12 scales that idea up and makes the interface itself modular.

Three Faceplates, Three Instruments

Toadstep turns the grid into a 16-step sequencer with octave jumps, slides and step repeats. It's the most conventional of the three in concept, but the touch surface changes the feel — steps respond to how you press, not just whether you pressed.

Blocks is a drum machine built around a procedural drum engine with arpeggiator settings. Rather than triggering fixed samples, it generates percussion from rules you steer in real time.

Chords handles advanced harmonic sequencing — the panel aimed at players who think in progressions and voicings rather than individual notes.

Crucially, the panels are sold separately as well as pre-installed. Buy one Plinky 12 as a complete instrument, then add faceplates later to expand what it does. That's an unusual commercial model for hardware, and a refreshingly anti-obsolescence one: the expensive part of the instrument doesn't need replacing when you want it to do something new.

Where It Sits in the Expressive Landscape

Plinky 12 isn't a dedicated MPE controller in the way an Expressive E Osmose or a LinnStrument is — it's a self-contained instrument first. But it belongs firmly to the same movement: the ongoing push away from velocity-and-note-off toward continuous, gestural control over every voice.

Capacitive grids are a genuinely different playing surface from keys or ribbons. The lack of physical key travel removes some tactile feedback, but it also removes the mental grid of fixed semitones, which is part of what makes instruments like the Haken Continuum and the Embodme Erae II compelling. Plinky's approach — a grid rather than a continuous plane — lands somewhere between the two, offering more spatial precision than a fully continuous surface while keeping pressure and position as live parameters.

The swappable-panel idea also quietly solves a problem that affects a lot of expressive hardware: discoverability. A blank touch surface can do almost anything, which often means players never find the deeper functions. Printing a dedicated interface over the same hardware gives each mode a legible identity, and lets the instrument teach you what it's for.

Availability

Plinky 12 is slated for Summer 2026, with pricing still to be confirmed at the time of the Superbooth announcement. Each configuration ships as a fully assembled standalone instrument, with additional faceplates available separately.

For anyone following the wider expressive-instrument space, it's worth watching how the modular-panel concept is received. If it works commercially, it's a template other builders could borrow — and it would push against the current pattern where expressive hardware tends to be expensive, single-purpose and slow to evolve after release.

More information is available from Making Sound Machines and at plinkysynth.com.