[IAmPym]

You are about to bite off a lot. I do this for a living.

You have some software experience, this is good. Assuming you have embedded software experience (which is essential for what you are doing and not at all like web programming) you have a foothold to finish this project without going completely insane.

Hardware is a completely different beast. With software everything happens in your head and when you get stuck you can usually think your way out of it. With hardware, you really do need to learn to do things meticulously and step by step. There are many things that can go wrong. You will learn a lot on this journey.

Don't be afraid to ask for help. Finding a hardware community will be essential to do this as you learn the skills you need. You're going to make a lot of mistakes, best to go in embracing it

A good place to start is to join an open source community for MIDI. Two off the top of my head is http://www.ucapps.de/ for MIDI specific hardware and https://www.electro-smith.com/daisy

A large amount of the work you will find yourself doing at the beginning is just figuring out where and who to ask questions about things like the keybed and other hardware issues. None of this is terribly 'hard' but none of it is easy. Most of it comes from experience.

It is almost always best to use someone else's product when you are designing your first. Roger Linn (https://www.rogerlinndesign.com/) gave me some fantastic advice a couple years ago when I was trying to design switch caps: "Do you want to be a company that designs switch caps or one that designs synthesizers?" and that stuck. I don't want to design switch caps, so I bought them off the shelf, contracted someone to design my own, and moved on.

So to that end... just buy a couple keybeds from Fatar or someone else, or just grab a synth you already have or buy one off ebay and harvest the keybed from that (often times much cheaper than buying direct!)

Don't be afraid to spend money on tools. If you find something difficult, like soldering, I have not once regretted spending money on better tools. They grow with you and save you hundreds if not thousands of hours of unnecessary frustration. When you know you need a tool, find a way to get it.

Maybe I should make a blog post about this... hmm

Hope that helps!

[brudgers]

How much simpler is a MIDI controller than a Sequential synthesizer?

By “simpler” I am thinking of making the actual hardware and software. Not thinking about making a lifestyle business out of selling them.

[IAmPym]

When you take audio out of the equation you don't need a lot of things:

What makes the sound? Not needed anymore. So any ADC/DACs, DSP code, analog voice hardware, etc is not needed. The DSP in particular is fairly complex and can be expensive depending on what you're doing

If you take the analog side of things out you don't need as complex power and all sorts of other things, so you may not even need a power supply at all, which is huge! Etc, etc.

Then there are things in the middle, like CVs, which are 'kinda' audio but not really since they are just control voltages. You can run them quite slow and still be useful (like 10kHz even). Or, you can treat them like audio, which is definitely my preference, so it depends on your implementation.

MIDI is a great place to start on a path to developing your own instruments. The amount you can do with a controller is CRAZY when you start to see how far it can go