Meet Jambé

As Robert Frost advised, we took the road less traveled and that has made all the difference. Sounds trite, but I’ll be honest – the last thing the world needs is another MIDI drum controller. We wanted something more. We wanted an instrument. Something with an intimate expressive link between gesture and sound. So we built extremely expressive hardware and wrote a custom sound engine to go with it.

It’s been a longer journey than any of us expected. Filled with false turns, the occasional dead end, and fresh starts. Talented musicians and sound designers were kind enough to play prototypes and give us their unvarnished feedback. We listened. Even when it wasn’t what we wanted to hear. And we refined our vision of both what Jambé was… and wasn’t.

A synthesizer you can hit. A weapon of mass percussion.

Jambé consists of two parts. The first is a unique physical playing surface. It feels great on your hands and has just the right bounce for playing with sticks. The high resolution sensor continuously reads the pressure on the pads opening up a world of modulation and sound shaping.

The pressure data gets sent to a custom application running on an iPad. The Jambé app combines a sample-based synthesizer with the extensive modulation capabilities – designed from the ground up to be played with a percussion interface. All responding to the continuous pressure data from the Jambé playing surface. It’s easy to download and share kits. For the more creative, the Jambé app includes a full kit editor. We use the Jambé app to create all of the sample kits we have available.

Whether you just want to have fun with kits you download or explore the depths of an ever evolving sound engine, whatever your experience level, Jambé makes it easy to make music.