I've always wanted to do music stuff too, and the NTS-1 is the most approachable piece of hardware with the best software ecosystem I've found yet for doing effects and synths (I've tried Arduino / Raspberry Pi based stuff before).
The Korg SDK [1] comes with a lot of tools right out of the box (biquad filters, dual delay lines, wave types, access to parameter knobs, etc.) and their dev environment is really easy to install (you upload patches via MIDI sysex!).
The actual audio programming is wonderful - Korg's SDK gives you an pointer array of realtime values which you can manipulate how you see fit before they hit the audio out. Its simple (I made a auto pan in 10 lines of code [2]) but powerful when you apply buffers, etc.
The Korg SDK [1] comes with a lot of tools right out of the box (biquad filters, dual delay lines, wave types, access to parameter knobs, etc.) and their dev environment is really easy to install (you upload patches via MIDI sysex!).
The actual audio programming is wonderful - Korg's SDK gives you an pointer array of realtime values which you can manipulate how you see fit before they hit the audio out. Its simple (I made a auto pan in 10 lines of code [2]) but powerful when you apply buffers, etc.
[1]: https://github.com/korginc/logue-sdk
[2]: https://github.com/schollz/logue/blob/master/simplepan/simpl...