Yamaha Tenori-On

$1,200

Home computers have made it very easy for anyone, regardless of knowledge or experience, to create music. Programs such as GarageBand, Fruity Loops, and Cakewalk use virtual instruments, loops, and audio samples to assemble beat-driven symphonies with a few clicks of a mouse. Yamaha’s Tenori-On is a new, digital musical instrument that packages those concepts into an intuitive, portable tablet so that desktop digital composers can step out onto the stage and perform their eclectic jams in front of a live audience.

The Tenori-On is designed around a grid of 256 LED-illuminated buttons. Each button represents a note. An illuminated line, representing the beat, moves across the screen from left to right. When buttons are selected on the grid, they light up, become active and play when the beat passes through them. The higher the button is on the grid, the higher the note on the scale. The closer to the left of the screen, the sooner it is played. Activating two notes on the same column creates a chord. Once the beat reaches the right side of the screen it repeats from the beginning and a loop is formed. As the loop passes, the musician can quickly edit the notes in real time and follow the loop as it repeats to play out a song.

The instrument is the brain child of Toshio Iwai who also created the Nintendo DS music game “Electroplankton” where players manipulate plants, fishes, and microscopic animals to create digital symphonies. Here he applies the same whimsy with a selection of alternate play modes. In addition to charting out music by tapping notes along the grid, players can glide their fingertips across the buttons to draw different musical shapes. In this mode the beat no longer moves from left to right, but instead follows the pattern of your drawing. The Random Mode sets the beat in motion from note to note in a random pattern, sometimes starting from the left, sometimes from the right, sometimes from below or above. It’s different each time the loop repeats. The Bounce Mode gives the beat a sense of gravity as it bounces from the bottom of the screen to the notes hanging above and the Push Mode creates ripples of sound around each activated note. Mr. Iwai is himself not a musician and one of his goals with his music projects has been to find ways to make music accessible.

This is not to say that the Tenori-On isn’t sophisticated or powerful. A series of function buttons along both sides of the tablet allow the same 256 LED buttons to be used to change settings and access a wide range of features for composing complex arrangements.

Holding down the L1 button changes the grid so that each button represents a different virtual instrument. From warbles, shimmers, and chimes to ghostly echoes, raindrops, and xylophones, there are 256 abstract instruments that you can choose from. Once you release the L1 button, the grid returns to back to notes, making it easy for players to quickly switch their selected music sequences to different instruments in the middle of a performance. The same applies to the other function buttons which let you temporarily switch the grid over to make changes to volume, tempo, loop points, loop speed, switch octaves, note length, and transposition. With practice, a Tenori-On player can reprogram their entire performance on stage, in mid-concert.

Click here to download Tenori-On MP3s samples

Naturally, the Tenori-On is designed to perform as more than one instrument. You can select up to sixteen different instruments, each with its own programmed musical loop, all synchronized to play at the same time, and all available to be changed and reprogrammed in mid-performance. Each instrument is assigned its own grid of buttons called a “Layer”. By holding down the R1 button you can switch between layers and tap out different musical loops using different instruments. Different layers play as different modes. So you can have one instrument playing a drawing, another playing its notes randomly, while you tap out changing notes in the main mode.

Once you begin to manage large groups of instruments, changing their music can be a complicated process. So, the Tenori-On can group the layers themselves into pre-saved arrangements called “Blocks”. One block can hold up to 16 layers. Again, in mid-performance you can hold down the R5 button to use the grid to switch from one block of layers to another. You can pre-create up to 16 different blocks. One of the challenges of creating music using loops is that the music can become repetitive, using blocks can help your music explore a variety of paths.

You can store all of your work including a sound recording of your performance onto a memory card using the SD card slot. The memory card can also be used to transfer over your own audio samples and digital voices which can then be added to the grid of instrument choices. One of the few criticisms I have is that the Tenori-On lacks an extreme range of instruments, there are very few deep base sounds or strong percussive and the ability to add your own samples works well to make up for this.

As a gadget, the Tenori-On has all the angles covered. It plays its music through built-in speakers, a headphone jack, and an audio-out port for external speakers. It has a MIDI connection port for the pros to connect the instrument up to their studios or to network amongst other Tenori-Ons for large-scale performances. For those who choose not to change their settings with the grid, there’s a jog dial and an LED display. You can use 6 AA batteries while rocking out on stage or the included AC adapter off. It even includes a clock and alarm function where the animated grid forms numbers and the alarm sounds an included demo song created by Yamaha. Short of a zesty lemon scent and home-made pyrotechnics, I can’t think of anything missing.

The Tenori-On is an exceptionally well-designed, intuitive instrument. It’s complicated while remaining accessible. It’s analytical enough for composition, yet fun enough for stage performances, and although its strength lies in electronic music, which can be considered an acquired taste, its expressive range is enough to give it a role in almost any band. Only time will tell if it can find a central role in the music industry. Will it become the keyboard synthesizer of the 21 century? The potential is certainly there.