The 'Tabla Touch' Is India’s First Performance-Ready Electronic Tabla

The tabla has always carried weight, literally and figuratively. Performers travelling with multiple tuned pairs tend to face logistical issues with transport, retuning between songs, and managing acoustic setups on stage. Kuljit Bhamra, one of the founding figures of the British Bhangra sound and currently Professor of Tabla at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London, has spent years engineering a solution to exactly this problem. The result is the Tabla Touch,  the world's first performance-ready electronic tabla, developed through his company Keda Music.

Bhamra's credentials are hard to overstate. He's performed on Andrew Lloyd Webber's Bombay Dreams in the West End, appeared on the Bend It Like Beckham soundtrack, and collaborated with musicians across genres and continents over a decades-long career. His goal with Keda Music has always been to demystify Indian percussion and bring it to a wider global audience. The Tabla Touch is the most ambitious expression of that mission yet.

The instrument comes in three models: the Pro, Studio, and Solo, each designed for different playing contexts, from professional live performance to home practice and hybrid acoustic setups. All three preserve the ergonomic feel of a traditional tabla while adding capabilities beyond what is possible in the acoustic tabla.

An instant tuning dial lets performers shift the key mid-song, eliminating the need to carry multiple tuned drums for a single setlist. Headphone outputs allow silent practice at home. MIDI connectivity opens the instrument up to DAWs and notation software, and Keda Music has developed compatibility with Steinberg's Dorico, letting players compose, notate, and publish Indian drum scores in a globally recognised format for the first time.

The sound library built into the Pro and Studio models goes beyond just tabla sounds. Bhamra personally played and sampled sounds across dholak, khol, mridangam, manjira, temple bells, and four distinct tabla sets, all recorded at high quality. The patented hit detection technology registers traditional playing techniques with genuine tonal variance, meaning the instrument responds to nuance in a way that earlier electronic tabla attempts failed to achieve. This is meant to be a performance instrument, engineered for the stage, not a novelty. To that end, the Tabla Touch has been used on Arijit Singh's UK and USA tours as well.

Dayan and bayan are the two drums of the tabla. The dayan is the smaller, right-hand wooden drum tuned to pitch with sharper tones, and the bayan is the larger, left-hand metal or clay drum that produces bass tones. The Tabla Touch Solo, designed for hybrid use, sits alongside a standard bayan and functions as an electronic dayan with Bluetooth connectivity, a practical bridge between traditional and electronic setups for players not ready to make a full switch.

Designed in the UK with base models manufactured in India, the makers also aim for these to be instruments in their own right. For touring musicians, music educators, producers working across genres, and beginners who want to engage with Indian percussion without years of prerequisite tuning knowledge, the Tabla Touch opens a new door.

As Bhamra put it at the Mumbai launch, the electronic tabla celebrates the traditional instrument rather than replacing it, targeting it to be genuinely playable; a serious instrument built by a serious musician, for the global community.

Explore the full range at keda.co.uk and follow @kedamusic on Instagram.

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