Bring the warmth of wooden bars and the intimacy of plucked steel into your productions. Maremba is a physically modelled percussion instrument for Reason, with four distinct instrument families and a playing response that changes with your touch. Use it for melodic hooks, interlocking rhythms, delicate accompaniment or spacious textures.
Every note is generated in real time from a strike or pluck, the vibrating instrument and its resonators. There are no recorded samples or fixed velocity layers. Softer playing changes the contact and tone as well as the level; repeated strokes interact with vibration already in motion.
Four instruments, four characters
- Imperial Rosewood: concert-marimba bars with tuned tubes and a rounded, clear attack.
- Mayan Padauk: shorter wooden bars and box resonators, with optional charleo membrane buzz.
- Balafon Ancestral: wooden keys, gourd resonators and optional buzzing membranes.
- Kalimba Artisan: plucked steel tines coupled to a yielding bridge and a shared wooden box.
Make the performance your own
Choose the striker or plucking technique, then shape Hardness, Position and Decay. Carving, Coupling, Bloom and Sympathetic change how the instrument resonates; Buzz, Tension, Artifacts and Variance add further character. Eleven velocity-sensitivity controls let you tailor the response to the part. Twenty factory patches offer immediate starting points, from clear solo instruments and soft thumb-piano phrases to rhythmic keys and extended ambient sounds.
Use the mod wheel for alternating-mallet rolls on wooden instruments, or to cover the Kalimba sound hole. Ring, Damp and Dead note-off modes change how phrases end. Equal temperament and six additional traditional or measured tuning layouts open up different melodic patterns.
Choose your perspective
Blend three distinct captures: airborne Close microphones, Room microphones and a contact Piezo pickup. Wood, Chamber and Hall offer different room characters. Width adjusts the stereo image, while Invert Piezo lets you explore the pickup’s polarity when combining captures. Drive colours the Main mix, Warmth adjusts its tonal balance and Limit can add linked stereo compression.
Build it into your rack
Main L/R is joined by independent Close L/R, Room L/R and mono Piezo outputs for separate processing. The direct captures bypass Main’s mix levels, Drive, Width, Warmth, Volume and musical limiting, and keep their own overload protection. Note/Gate inputs and five modulation CV inputs connect performance and sound shaping to the rest of the rack.
Choose 8, 16 or 24 voices and native 1x, 2x, 4x or 8x Quality. New devices and the factory bank start at 16 voices, native 1x and Linear velocity response. Higher Quality factors trade more processing for reduced aliasing. Requires Reason 14 or later.
The existing audio examples feature earlier versions.
Version history
1.5.7
Refined the 20 factory sounds with gentler, preset-specific velocity depths and selected resonance adjustments. Load a fresh factory preset to hear these changes; saved patches retain their own settings.
Refreshed the panel with a Walnut & Champagne finish, handwritten title and a wider, clearer header. Put Quality in ascending 1x, 2x, 4x, 8x order while preserving saved settings, corrected its rear-panel image registration, and improved repeated-note release handling in Reason.
The update also brings native 1x processing, revised factory balance and Main headroom, refined bar/resonator and Kalimba pickup balance, and improved Damp note-off handling during Quality changes. Sound and level can differ from older versions even when saved controls retain their values.
1.5.0
Reworked Decay with natural sustain at the midpoint, moved Drive to the complete Main mix, aligned Main’s Piezo capture with Close, and refined Room reflections and factory capture/Volume balance.
