Hello All,

There have been many posts in the forum about future developments for Tenori-on and requests to address specific issues in an OS upgrade. There have also been comments questioning whether anyone from Yamaha monitors the site and reads the concerns of Tenori-on customers.

We here at Yamaha US do monitor the site on a regular basis. We have not posted before this because we had been unable until very recently to get a clear message from Yamaha Japan about the overall future of Tenori-on.

As you can imagine the past year has been a huge challenge for musical instrument companies because of the global economic situation and many future plans had to be evaluated and revised. Tenori-on is a very special product and it has been hard for Yamaha to make decisions about this kind of product in the tough economic environment. We apologize for not responding before this, but we wanted to be very clear that we were providing the forum with correct and accurate information.

Although at this time we can not give you any specific details or timelines, we can confirm that in the past weeks we have received a very clear message from Japan that there are firm plans for future development of the Tenori-on platform. We have also begun in depth discussions with the engineers about several of the core issues that have been raised here on the forums.

We will continue to monitor the forums and will post whenever we have accurate information to relay the community. We expect that in the near future we will be able to discuss future plans in more detail and with more definitive timelines.

We understand that people have been frustrated by the lack of response and also that people will be impatiently waiting for more detailed news soon.

All we can promise is that we will relay information as soon as we can confirm it.

There are lots of exciting things happening with Tenori-on. It has been selected to be displayed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York as a work of art, Little Boots has won awards in the UK and has been signed to a major US record deal, and the community here has an intense passion for this unique instrument.

We wish that we could have gotten a clear message sooner, but we hope that people will view this post as a a positive sign that things are finally starting to happen for future Tenori-on possibilities.

We are looking forward to giving you more details as soon as it is possible.

GREAT NEWS Yamaha US! I have maintained faith and I look forward to more news on the further development of the platform I already love to use so much,

Thomas White
Natural Rhythm Music
http://www.naturalrhythmmusic.com

WOW ! thanks for the info too !

Excellent News....keep the dream alive guys !

Fingers crossed. This is actually great news!
Let me suggest that you set up a poll for 'most wanted fix' / 'most wanted feature'.

There have been many good suggestions here on how to expand the concept of the Tenori-on. Some are within its frameset both conceptually and possible with current hardware, and should of course be taken spacial note of. Quite a few people seems to want the Tenori-on to be something else! Although it is probably possible to implement some of these more 'generic sequencer' features too, I hope Iwai san will be consulted so that the original mindset of the Tenori-on is kept intact, even with new development added. Some requests are probably not possible to meet without a hardware upgrade. That would mean taking your Tenori-on apart and reassemble it. I wouldn't mind doing that I guess, so please don't rule out a hardware upgrade kit!
What issues are the most burning for most people is diffucult to gauge without some kind of poll, er even a user survey. Thanks for any effort!

(For me, I guess Layer copy without going through menus (i.e. something similar to Block copy) is on the top list, as well as independent scale selection for layers; at least a choice of 'master scale' and chromatic. Riff transposition on a Layer via one button and a double click . . . I'm sweating now )

Switching between blocks on the next count instead of immediatly.

Excellent news! I'm sure the engineers could come up with a firmware update which would make a lot of us even happier with our Tenori-ons, and it's good to hear that there's a possibility of that. I just hope the device isn't already using every last scrap of its runtime memory to do what it can do now...

Looking forward to hearing more, and thanks for letting us know.

Very good news. Hope it happens soon!

Swing Time, Swing Time, Swing Time...

Clock stability when switching layers and functions...

Sample volume control?...

Follow incoming MIDI clock better...

wOOt! Good news, but had to put my suggestions in here based on my own usage.

Thanks again Yamaha!

I just can't wait !
Tenori-on is such a great piece of art !