An instrument designer’s own company.

Keith McMillen Instruments, known as KMI, was the company of the American instrument designer Keith McMillen, and it was based in Berkeley, California — the city named on its press releases from 2013 onwards and in a 2015 Tape Op review. The company says he founded it in 2005.

He had been designing instruments for a quarter of a century by then. He founded Zeta Music in 1979, the company known for electric violins; the synthesizer news site Synthtopia wrote in 2024 that Zeta built violins “for the likes of Jean-Luc Ponty and Laurie Anderson” and made guitar effects and “the first programmable MIDI audio mixer.” KMI’s biography of him adds that in 1992, as a vice-president of Gibson, he set up an R&D lab called G-WIZ and led the work on ZIPI, a proposed successor to MIDI that, the company says, later evolved into the OSC protocol; that he was director of engineering at Harman Kardon in 1996; and that in 1999 he founded Octiv, an audio-processing company whose Volume Logic plugin sold for iTunes, which he sold to Plantronics in April 2005. English Wikipedia’s Oberheim article records that the Oberheim OB-Mx synthesizer was produced “under the direction of Keith McMillen” after Gibson bought Oberheim. He also founded BEAM, a non-profit for music made with new technology, Synthtopia reported.

In first-person text on the KMI website he wrote that his love of electronic music began at eleven with a copy of Switched-On Bach, and that he later grew bored with synthesizers because “the subtlety and nuance of tight performance control was missing.”

Pads with no moving parts.

KMI’s answer was sensors. Its controllers replace keys, pads and switches that move with surfaces that measure pressure and position — what the company calls Smart Sensor technology, built on a conductive “Smart Fabric.” Synthtopia summed up the approach in 2024: many KMI designs “eliminate the moving parts of traditional designs, and replace them with state-aware multi-touch ‘smart fabric’.”

The products arrived in quick succession, according to rekkerd.org. The SoftStep foot controller was released in November 2010, the 12 Step pedal keyboard was introduced in September 2011, and the QuNeo, an iPad-sized pad controller sensitive to pressure and position, in December 2011. The QuNexus, a small keyboard with two octaves of pad-like keys, was launched on Kickstarter in November 2012 and shipped in May 2013. The company also made the K-Bow, a sensor bow for string players. The K-Board, a 13-inch keyboard, was announced in October 2014 as available exclusively at Guitar Center stores in the US, the company said; the K-Mix, an audio interface and programmable mixer, shipped in January 2016.

Crowdfunding became a habit. The BopPad, a smart-fabric drum pad, went to Kickstarter in August 2016 and reached shops in September 2017; the K-Board Pro 4, a four-octave keyboard with fixed silicone keys, was launched on Kickstarter in November 2016. When Sound On Sound reviewed it in November 2019, it called it the most recent MPE controller to come to market, MPE being the standard that lets each note carry its own pitch bend and pressure, and noted that its keys “really are discrete sensor arrays.” In 2017 KMI and the drum maker Pearl introduced the malletSTATION, an electronic mallet controller, and in June 2018 Pearl became KMI’s North American distributor, rekkerd.org reported. A brightly coloured K-Board-C followed in October 2022.

Design and documentation.

A controller keyboard makes no sound of its own: it sends MIDI, the standard that lets instruments and computers talk to one another. Dave Smith demonstrated it at the Winter NAMM Show in 1983, and the specification was published that August, English Wikipedia says. A newer extension, MIDI Polyphonic Expression (MPE), which lets each note in a chord be shaped separately, was adopted by the MIDI Manufacturers Association in January 2018.

Two makers here share an owner. Akai Professional and M-Audio belong to inMusic, the private group in Cumberland, Rhode Island. Jack O’Donnell, its founder, bought Akai Professional in 2004 or 2005 — sources differ — and inMusic took over M-Audio, founded in 1988 as Midiman, from Avid in July 2012.

The others are smaller. Nektar Technology is “California-based,” Sound On Sound wrote in 2019; the company dates itself to 2009. Keith McMillen Instruments, of Berkeley, California, announced in September 2024 that it was rebranding as Muse Kinetics. ROLI, maker of the Seaboard, is London-based; after its original company entered administration in 2021, a new company took over the brand, English Wikipedia says.

Two are European. Expressive E calls itself a French company founded in 2013, and its legal notice gives a registered office in Marseille. Studiologic is a brand of Fatar, the keyboard-mechanism maker founded in Recanati, in Italy’s Marche, in 1956; Fatar says it has factories in Recanati and in Tunisia.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A new name after the founder.

Keith McMillen died in late August 2024; the company announced his death that weekend, Synthtopia reported on 3 September 2024. His last venture, it noted, was Sensible Robotics, which applied smart fabric to “robot skin”; the company’s obituary adds that he founded BeBop Sensors in 2014 to take the fabric into wearables and haptics.

On 17 September 2024 the company announced that it was rebranding as Muse Kinetics, a change that Synthtopia said “was in the works prior to” his death. Its announcement said the business had “undergone substantial changes” in recent years, and explained the name: its instruments “are all designed to measure force, and respond to creative gestures and articulated motions.” The first products under the new name were a “Galaxy” colour of the QuNexus and BopPad, the 12 Step2 and the SoftStep3; the K-Board-C and K-Board Pro 4 would keep KMI branding until stock was sold, and the K-Mix and QuNeo were discontinued. The chief executive, Eric Bateman, said: “We stand on his shoulders.” We found no report that the company was sold, and make no claim about its ownership.

The Muse Kinetics website still describes the company as “based in Berkeley, California,” and lists the malletSTATION alongside its own controllers. We found no statement on either website about where the products are manufactured, so we make no claim.

For a design guide, KMI shows how a founder’s name can carry a brand and then give way to a name that describes the idea. Compare Novation, whose Launchpad also made pad grids a format, and Ableton, whose Live software many KMI users controlled. For this guide we use black, a cyan and a violet with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Keith McMillen Instruments’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.