Remember those ribbon controllers of a bygone era? Well give a warm welcome to Marimba Lumina's controller strips. These guys can recognize four different mallets, and together can provide real time simultaneous control of as many as eight different functions. (Pitch benders, modwheels, cross faders, controls for volume, panning, and timbre; the possibilities boggle the mind.)

FEATURES   Hit a bar, pad, or strip, and one of these activity indicators lights up, its color reflecting the color of the striking mallet.

In case you could use a few more stimuli to get things going (octave flips?, instrument changes?), or perhaps some extra sounds that would best reside outside the bar array, we offer these ten pads to accommodate those special needs. And while we're on the subject, let's mention that any bar or pad can be programmed to send any MIDI note number. Don't care for your synth's idea about how a drum kit should be organized? Have it your way.

Marimba Lumina comes equipped with an ample supply of factory installed programs. Some serve a tutorial function, some are blatant imitations of vibes and other tuned percussion, a few are imports from outer space. Additionally there are user-defined programs stored internally and stashed on memory cards. Call up any of these with a hit on the program pad followed by a number.

Had it with navigating through 17 menu layers to get at one little piece of data? Those dim little 2 by 16 displays are the culprit. Marimba Lumina's 80 character LCD presents a lot of data in one shot. Enlightenment is never further than three mallet strikes away.

Marimba Lumina runs on 12 volts and draws a miserly 10 watts. Power it from the A.C. adapter (provided), or from your long abandoned car lighter.

Memory cards store up to 50 programs, facilitating program exchange, library management, and backup. Accidentally plug a card in upside down? Marimba Lumina reads it anyway.

Fashioned of select walnut, the Frame is less than two inches thick. Weight is fifteen pounds. If you miss the sheer mass of your acoustic ax, we might be able to build in some sandbags.

Got some trigger pads, foot switches or a pedal you'd like to stir into the soup? Go for it. Triggers and switches can serve as stimuli for all sorts of responses; a pedal can be directed to just about any variable.

What's the mallet equivalent to a keyboard? Barboard? Call it what you might, this array of bars can be split, zoned, tuned, and layered in ways you might not believe. But it's true.

Marimba Lumina communicates with the world via this MIDI facility, and it does so with remarkable finesse. And somehow, the instrument accomplishes melody tracking, note dampening, and other such "MIDI impossible" tasks.

68 LED's show the status of each and every bar, pad, and strip. Alternatively they can respond to an incoming MIDI data stream. Playing in the dark? Just light 'em all up. Now you know why we called it Lumina.

These are rather special mallets. If one so much as gets near a bar, Marimba Lumina's on to it. The colors are to help you determine which is which. Marimba Lumina figures it out electronically. In addition to performance, mallets are used to select and edit Marimba Lumina's programs.

Want to be the envy of every keyboard player on your block? Marimba Lumina's bars not only know when and how fast they've been hit, they know which mallet hit and where. (Show us a piano that knows which fingers on a key!)

Marimba Lumina is a programmable controller. A tap on the edit pad transforms the top octave into an interactive facility for specifying Marimba Lumina's responses to a player's actions. The software team charged with creating the instrument's musical language was headed by Mark Goldstein, whose second hat is that of an accomplished marimba player. Needless to say, Mark endowed Marimba Lumina with capabilities that only a mallet player could appreciate. Differentiate between chords and single line melody? No problem.

What are audio outputs doing on a controller? Marimba Lumina comes equipped with an internal synthesizer and lots of tutorial and demonstration programs to help accelerate the learning process. Crack open the box, plug things in, and have at it. Now wipe that silly grin off your face. Eventually you'll open the instruction manual.