Hardware instruments die badly. The company moves on, the firmware stops being updated, the editor stops running on current operating systems, and eventually the thing is a paperweight with a cult following and no support.
The Chompi — Chase Bliss’s sampling keyboard — has ended differently.
What happened
Chase Bliss ended development of the hardware, stating they had been “pushing against the limits of what the hardware was capable of.”
Then Chase Bliss and Chompi Club released the device’s firmware under an open-source licence.
And TemeculaDSP built Nibbi from it: a free plugin in VST, AU and AAX that reproduces the Chompi’s core behaviour — “record and sample sounds, play them across the keyboard, layer tape-style loops, and get weird with lo-fi saturation, wow and flutter, delay, reverb, and filters.”
Why this is the correct way to discontinue an instrument
The phrase worth noticing is “pushing against the limits of what the hardware was capable of.” That is an unusually honest end-of-life statement. It is not “market conditions” or “we’re focusing elsewhere” — it is an engineering admission: the concept outgrew the box it shipped in.
Which is precisely the situation where open-sourcing is the right move, because the value was never in the hardware. The Chompi’s appeal was its behaviour — the specific character of its tape loops, the way its saturation and wow-and-flutter interacted, the particular lo-fi it produced. That behaviour lives in the DSP, and the DSP is code.
Keeping that code closed after ending the product destroys value for no gain. Releasing it means:
- Existing owners get a future. Community firmware can fix bugs and add features that the company no longer will.
- The sound survives the silicon. A plugin can outlive the hardware indefinitely.
- The design becomes teachable. Anyone curious about how those tape effects are built can now read them.
There is a real precedent for this working. Teenage Engineering’s OP-1 community, Mutable Instruments’ open-sourcing of their entire module line (which is why Plaits, Rings and Braids live on in VCV Rack, in clones, and in licensed products), and Axoloti all demonstrate that open-sourcing a discontinued design strengthens a company’s reputation rather than cannibalising it. Émilie Gillet shutting Mutable down and leaving the designs open is one of the most-respected acts in modern instrument building.
What you lose in the translation, and it is not trivial
Synthtopia’s coverage puts it correctly: “a big part of the appeal of the Chompi is its immediacy and tactile control of sound.”
That is the honest caveat and it deserves more than a sentence. A sampling keyboard is a gestural instrument. You grab a sound, you play it across the keys, you reach for a knob while it loops — and the quality of the result comes substantially from how fast the loop between intention and hand and sound is. A plugin puts a mouse and a screen in that loop.
Nibbi has the algorithms. It does not have the instrument. Those are different products, and anyone who loved the Chompi for the way it felt should expect to like Nibbi somewhat less than they expect to.
The mitigation is obvious and worth doing: map it to a controller. Any cheap MIDI controller with eight knobs, mapped to the saturation, wow, flutter, loop length and filter, restores most of what the mouse took away. The sampling-into-a-keyboard gesture is harder to recover, but a keyboard with a sustain pedal and a decent sampler workflow gets close.
The broader point for anyone building hardware
If you make and sell instruments, the Chompi’s ending is a template. Decide now what happens to your firmware when the product ends, and say so publicly while you are still selling it. It costs nothing, it is a genuine differentiator for buyers who have been burned before, and it is the difference between your instrument becoming a legend and becoming landfill.
And if you are buying: ask. “What happens to the firmware if you discontinue it?” is a fair question, and the answer tells you a lot about a company.