First there was Guitar Hero and its recent incarnation, version III. Then there was MTV’s Rock Band, adding plastic drums you play to a color coded prompt. Soon, Jada will give us a musical Rock Band Air Guitar, and Gibson has its back ordered robotic guitar. Allegro Music has Piano Wizard and soon, Guitar Wizard. What if you could replace all of this with one pad? One pad!

Synesthesia’s Mandala 2.0, almost three years in development, has announced and is shipping a USB drum pad. But what a pad! You can play drums, piano, marimba, vibraphones, and guitar, all from this one instrument. Unlike no other, this fully midi pad can have from one to seven zones, chosen via software. Included are two drum sticks, the Virtual Brain software, a USB cable, and four GB of sound samples. Each pad lists for $349. But you’ll probably want at least two.

You assign a sound to each zone, from a list of 100 included instruments. Almost one-half of the selection is drums. Included are 3,000 professionally recorded samples of a Black Beauty snare drum. Not only does the pad have an extremely fast trigger, it is also very sensitive to where and how hard it is hit. With one preset, you get up to 15,000 sounds. Add a tonal pedal, and you could get two million sounds from one pad. You can assign any instrument, or variation of same, to any of the up to seven zones. Each zone can be configured for at least 13 different parameters such as pan, pitch and decay. As in the demonstration I saw, on one pad you could have a complete drum kit (seven different drums) a piano and string section on another pad. Since the Mandala is a midi device, you can even add your own recorded instruments.

How does Mandala work? There are 128 control rings in the proprietary membrane, giving a kind of moiré pattern in the picture of the Mandala’s guts. That membrane allows position and intensity to vary the sound produced, according to other software settings. Mandela also ships with at least 16 different audio effects, and works with almost any music software, such as Garage Band.

This pad was co-created by Danny Carey of the rock band Tool and Vince DeFranco of Synesthesia. There are a number of you tube videos featuring Danny playing the Mandela: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tt87SjSHIv0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC5Wcs0AKnU&NR=1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tt87SjSHIv0&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC5Wcs0AKnU&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQxm5XXiwE8&feature=related

Others using Mandela include Pat Mastelotto of King Crimson, Will Calhoun of Living Color, and Lol Tolhurst, co-founder of The Cure. There is a Google Group dedicated to the Mandala, where users can trade tips.