Benjamin is a tactile control surface and iPad stand that replaces fiddly touchscreen gestures with physical controls. It helps musicians keep their focus on the instrument while they learn from tutorial videos.
Music education tech has been moving quickly. Recent examples include guitars with light-up fretboards that guide your fingers and ROLI's AI Music Coach, which tracks your hands at the piano and gives feedback in real time.
For a huge number of players, though, the teacher is simply a YouTube video, and the main obstacle is the interface. Everyone knows how many attempts it can take to successfully grab the progress bar on a touchscreen and drag it back by the correct amount, but for musicians who need to repeat the same riff over and over again, that small annoyance becomes a genuine barrier.
Toronto-based Benjamin Industries tackles that problem with a dedicated hardware controller that doubles as a stand. Founder Robinson Kelly came up with the idea while teaching himself bass during the pandemic. He drew on his earlier career as a television video editor, where physical controls made jumping to an exact moment second nature.
Benjamin's headline trick is two-press looping. You tap the IN button where a passage starts and OUT where it ends, and the section starts repeating immediately. Dedicated buttons nudge the loop's boundaries, and holding IN or OUT while turning the scroll wheel adjusts them frame by frame.
The same wheel handles general navigation. It can jump by chapter, in 10-, 5-, or 1-second steps, or one frame at a time. Playback speed moves in 5% increments in either direction, so you can gradually work a solo up to tempo or push past it for a challenge. A single button snaps everything back to normal speed.
Thirteen backlit switches cover play/pause, mute, fullscreen, captions, bookmarks, playlists, and voice search, while a physical slider handles volume. The companion app lets you name, save, and organize loops and bookmarks into playlists. It plays YouTube within the app itself, and it also works with Apple Music and media files stored on the iPad.
The aluminum and ABS unit measures 280 x 190 x 25 mm (11 x 7.5 x 1 in) and weighs about 950 g (2 lb). It pairs over Bluetooth LE with iPads from the mini up to the 13-inch Pro running iPadOS 16 or later, and it can also mount on tripods and VESA arms. Its 3,200-mAh battery is rated for roughly nine days at three hours of daily practice.
Benjamin recently launched on Kickstarter and hit its CAD 10,000 (around US$7025) goal within 15 minutes. Super Early Bird pledges start at around CA$499 (around US$350), against a planned retail price of CAD 699 (around US$490).
All crowdfunding campaigns carry an element of risk, and this appears to be the first project from Benjamin Industries. The husband and wife team has been joined by acclaimed software engineer Erik von Harten to help ensure a smooth user experience on the app side of things. Patents in Canada and the US have been secured, and the fresh-faced company is aiming for final testing and certifications by December. Production is estimated to start from June 2027, with shipping following a month later.
All-in-one learning gadgets like the mu6label try to teach you themselves. Benjamin takes a different approach: it treats the vast library of free lessons already online as the curriculum and focuses on making that content easier to drill. That's a narrower pitch, but arguably a smarter one. It isn't limited to music either, since dance, sports, and craft tutorials could benefit from the same precise control.
There are some limitations. Benjamin is iPad-only for now, and it can't control the native YouTube app. Still, support for more platforms is planned, and the app requires no subscription. For anyone tired of fighting their screen mid-practice, it could be a welcome upgrade.
Sources: Benjamin Industries, Kickstarter
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