Ramon Manas, Guilem Magdaleno, Hector Parra, and Velenti Acconcia want to spread music around the world by helping new musicians to develop skills easily and quickly. Ramon lived in Berlin and when learning the saxophone realized that the instrument is loud and can impose on neighbors, with one call made to police during his training. He also learned that traveling with a saxophone is expensive and inconvenient due to its size and weight. After the team did market research with saxophone players the common issues of noise and transport were the big problems, and they started to design a solution.
The team had four goals when designing their new saxophone: they wanted a small and light electronic saxophone, the system had to feel like a real saxophone's key position and pressure, practice needed to be possible without disturbing other people, and the system needed an app to schedule practice routines and teach basic saxophone concepts. The end product of this design cycle is the Travel Sax, currently running a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter.
Users can bring their own mouthpiece to the Travel Sax, and the FAQ page says that soprano, alto, tenor and baritone mouthpieces will work. The system plays three octaves, from Bb3 to F#6. The system weighs 300 grams and without the mouthpiece is approximately 22 centimeters long, the company's webpage likes the size to a plastic water bottle. The rechargeable lithium battery is expected to last for six hours of playtime. The app pairs to the saxophone over 4.0 Bluetooth Low Energy and USB connections.
The campaign page isn't clear about many technical details, much of body is 3D printed but I'm assuming there needs to be some metal inside too along with the printed circuitboard and electronics. The crowdfunding blew past its €7,000 goal in the first day and looks to keep adding funders. This is a great story of a team of users frustrated with a product, who did research and then created constraints for a design and product to meet their needs. The campaign ends on April 12, 2019.