Yamaha brings Tenori-on Orange to US
updated 08:15 am EST, Fri February 19, 2010
Cheaper Tenori-On instrument comes stateside
Yamaha on Friday brought the Tenori-on Orange to the US. The unique musical instrument was previously available in Japan and is a lower-cost version of the original pad, which centers on pressing any one of 256 LED buttons to create both light and sounds. The Orange is meant for personal more than public performance and omits the lights on the back, can no longer run on AA batteries and uses a plastic frame instead of magnesium.
As before, the Tenori-on is made from the ground up to interact with computers and has both MIDI in and out to either sync with another Tenori-On or control either a computer or another instrument. It can also load compositions through SD cards and comes with both Mac OS X and Windows software to simplify the process.
Unusually, Yamaha lists the official price at $1,000 but fully expects customers to get an actual street price of $700 at music stores. A firmware update is also coming for the full-featured version, which still costs $1,500 officially but $1,000 in practice.
Professional Poster
Joined: Sep 1999
Musical instrument?
A box with buttons that makes sounds is now a musical instrument? I suppose technically speaking it is, but it's more like a sequencer with a light show than it is an instrument. The web site's launch video doesn't actually show him playing music, just activating loops by pressing a button once in a while while it flashes lights in a pattern.
This reminds me of the weird MIT media lab music experiments that make their way into the news once in a while. They're novel, but rarely make it to mainstream and aren't that practical.