We interviewed 15 professional musicians and music producers from Spain and LATAM, that use MIDI controllers daily in their workflow.

Our biggest discovery was that 15 out of 15 users don't use all the components within their controllers. There are some components or groups of components that they barely use or never use.

MIDI controllers that currently sell in the market have predefined designs, the problem is that must musicians/music producers use them for very different tasks, so they have to shape the way they use their controllers for the current task they are performing. Artists choose a MIDI controller based on the most common use they will give it, but most of the times this is not optimal.

Pain points occur in 2 different steps: acquisition and usage.

The first pain point occurs during the acquisition journey, specifically in the buying decision step, because artists have to decide which controller they get, based on the availability on the market.

The second pain point is spotted in the usage journey, when artists have a controller for a while, it happens very often that they change some steps in their music creation or performance process so they have to adjust their controller to the new tasks and sometimes this doesn't work.

This guided us to explore customizable and modular designs for the controller.

To address the first pain point, it was important for us to understand that the acquisition should be part of a service, so we decided to design an online service where out users could design a bespoke controller based on their real needs.

We developed a website that allow musicians and music producers design a unique MIDI controller by drag and dropping the components they need. Once they have a controller layout they are happy with, they can order it!

The second pain point took us longer to address, we already had a service to create custom MIDI controllers, but what if our users need to change the layout of the controller? or replace a component they no longer need?

We wanted to achieve 2 goals with it, to make it affordable and very simple for our users. Sometimes this two characteristics are not compatible, however, after two years of testing different solutions to this problem, we could make it.

The first version of the controller was tested in Sonar+D Festival Barcelona in 2017, a music and technology festival that hosts over 6000 accredited professionals from the music, tech and entertainment industry. We gathered really good and constructive feedback that led us to design MD-1 v1.0.

MD-1 v1.0 took us one and a half year to develop and we took it back to Sonar+D Festival 2019 most of the feedback this time was positive from festival visitors and specialized media.

We wanted to translate a seamless and intuitive experience throughout all the journeys within the usage of the controller. Another important journey was the controller configuration software.

During this design stage it was actually very simple for us, we did a heuristic analysis of our principal competitors software and we spotted some improvement opportunities. We designed some Figma prototypes and tested it with a group of musicians and we just iterated once until putting it into production. We measured the NPS once the software was launched and we got a 10/10 score within all our early adopters.

Tinami project covered more areas than just product design, it also involved the creation of a complete brand ecosystem. To create this experience, we had to develop a concept. Tinami's vision is to democratize music creation, even it's own name states for "this is not a musical instrument", aiming to sell devices for people that doesn't consider themselves as musicians.

To achieve this vision with this concept we decided to market the first controller as it was a pizza. Choose the ingredients, and order it!

Tinami has been displayed in international music and technology festivals like: Sonar+D 2017 & 2019 in Barcelona, SXSW Austin in 2018, Wallifornia Music Tech 2019 in Belgium, MAC Fest 2019 in Tenerife. It has featured in specialized media: FACT Magazine, Create Digital Music, Synth Anatomy, GearNews, Sonic State, Music Radar, AskAudio and DJWorx, receiving very positive feedback about its design and how innovative it is. It have received some recognitions and have been nominated in important awards like Best product of the year in Hispasonic, the most important audio and technology magazine from Spain.

However, the mos important achievement was to achieve a 10/10 NPS from all our early adopters, 23 musicians and music producers that got the first MD-1 units.