Ever since I got my hands on Millennium Chess Genius, I’ve been looking for other board games to keep me engaged after a hectic day at work. When I came across Tembo, I mistook it for a board game, but it is actually a magnetic drum machine and sampler. If you think it’s stupid of me not to recognize the basic difference between a board game and a musical instrument, I am guilty as charged. But so are many other publications online that had the same take upon encountering the pictures of Tembo.
At first glance, Tembo looks more like a handcrafted Checkers set than a studio instrument. That is precisely what its manufacturer wants. Musical Beings – headed by a team of former Google, Waves Audio, and Wix employees – want to “enable everyone to create music from the very first touch.”
Boasting a game-style interface, Tembo is a beginner-friendly step sequencer, sampler, and drum machine. It constitutes a gameboard-like top panel, a 16-step sequencer grid where users assign sounds to each row, then drop magnetic pucks onto the grid to build beats and melodic loops.
“Each step in the sequencer has two sub-steps; placing one Beat inserts a step on the first sixteenth-note, stacking two triggers both, and you can flip a Beat over to add a step on the second sixteenth-note only. Tempo, swing, and pattern length are dialled in via the knobs in the bottom-left corner,” Music Radar explains after a thorough look at the product.
Tembo wooden drum machine comes with eight built-in sample packs, each containing five sounds, and each channel can hold two switchable samples. Players can also plug in any external instrument, a guitar, keyboard, or sample it directly, thanks to a built-in microphone and line-in port.
“If you search for step sequencers or drum machines, they look complex and intimidating, even if they are also beautiful, metal and black, lacking the aesthetics of something inviting. We chose to make Tembo out of wood to get people feeling natural next to it. This is something I want to keep on the dining table, because it’s inviting and pleasant to look at. Wood integrates naturally into any room,” says Ayal Rosenberg, one of the co-founders behind the project.
Interestingly, there’s no screen anywhere on the device. Every interaction is handled via knobs, buttons, and magnetic pucks. For advanced users, Tembo supports dual USB-MIDI with external clock sync and connects to DAWs such as Logic Pro or Reaper for full recording sessions. The machine is battery-powered with a built-in speaker, making it genuinely portable, and a companion app unlocks interactive lessons and gamified challenges to help new players get up to speed.
Tembo wooden drum machine is currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter at a discounted price of $369, down from its expected retail price of $550. As Engadget noted, the campaign has already sailed past its initial funding goal, with Musical Beings claiming that “several units have already been built and are in musicians’ hands.” If all goes to plan, orders are slated to ship worldwide in January 2027.
