St. Ann's, Port of Spain: November 17, 2011

Kristopher Maillard – Manager Mobile Services – Digital Business Ltd. Digital Pan Launch Speech

Thank you very much.

Let me especially thank the Permanent Secretary for the Ministry of Arts and Multiculturalism for being here today. I would also like to welcome the President of Pan Trinbago, Mr. Keith Diaz, Honourable guests, ladies and gentlemen; today is an auspicious and historic day. You’re going to see today a melding of technology with the steelpan.

We have beautiful steelpan playing here in the background and a little later on you’re going to see how we have married both the traditional steelpan with technology and in so doing, taken the steelpan to the next level. The steelpan has evolved!

Today we are unleashing Digital Pan to the world! Digital Pan is now the OFFICIAL steelpan app of Trinidad and Tobago.

It is history in the making and I’m sorry that Mr. Quinten Questel our CEO could not been here with us today due to the fact that he is unwell. It is a great honour for me to present Digital Pan to you. However, the honour should really have been our CEO’s.

I need to give you a little bit of a background as to what Digital Pan is and how we reached to this point. How did we get onto this stage, literally, to unleash Digital Pan to the world? Late last year, Digital Business made a strategic decision to go into the mobile application development arena and Mr. Quinten Questel, in his brilliance, decided to have a competition within the office to see who could come up with the best idea for a mobile application.

He received close to forty (40) entries for the competition and the application that won the competition was Digital Pan.

What we are trying to do with Digital Pan, is bring the entire steelpan family to these, your FINGERTIPS. You don’t need pan sticks; you just need your fingertips. We want to make the steelpan accessible to you everywhere and whenever you want. This is pan at your FINGERTIPS!

So let’s think of a couple scenarios, you’re on a plane to Miami, you take out your iPad/iPhone, you plug in your earphones and you start taping away on the screen, you start composing, you start playing “Woman on the bass” right there on the airplane. Think of this, you wake up in the middle of the night and you have this melody, you have a bass line pounding in your head, how would you record that? You are stuck in traffic with three children in the back seat, they have a lovely steelpan at home but you want them to practice now, you want them to learn more about the pan now. What do you do?You take out one of these [Your Phone] and hand it to them and say, “Here practice…become the next Boogsie”.

That’s what we are trying to achieve with Digital Pan. When Mr Christian Lalla (who was the person that came up with the great idea that we should do Digital Pan and who was the person that won the competition back in the office) said that we should take a fresh new look at the steelpan, we realized you know what…there may be other steelpan apps out there that run on phones and tablet devices, maybe there are some that run on websites…but are they done right? Do they sound like the real thing, do they look like the real thing, can you record what you are doing, are you getting access to all of the pans in the steelpan family, were they made/built by Trinidadians?

Are you getting a high c tenor are you getting a low c tenor, are you getting a three cello, a tenor bass? Will you get the six base?

So we were talking in the office and as you may know, Steve Jobs the CEO of Apple passed away recently. Now Apple is not necessarily the first to market with something. For example, they were not the first people to come out with an iPod. But you know what they were good at? They were good at being the FIRST TO DO IT RIGHT. That is what Digital Business is striving for with Digital Pan…doing it right. We’re looking to get the steelpan and the entire steelpan family done right electronically and we want it on every little finger tip, wherever you are whatever you’re doing whatever situation you’re in, we want you to have access to the steelpan and the whole family of steelpans.

So once Digital Pan won this competition and we had a prototype in place, we said OK there are a couple things that we need to do to do this thing right. We need to get Pan Trinbago involved, we need to have the world governing body for steelpan involved and we need to know that we can claim that this is the OFFICIAL electronic steelpan of Trinidad and Tobago.

Digital Business is not in the business of creating steelpans, we don’t tune steelpans, so how are we going to get the best sound quality and how are we going to get the best images of the steelpan for Digital Pan? We approached Gill’s Pan Shop and they had a wonderful series of pans, the Gill Masters Series™ of pans and working with Mazzini Gill and his team, we went into the recording studio and we produced some fantastic high quality sounds for these pans. You’re going to hear a little bit just now of the real pan and I’m going to play for you what Digital Pan sounds like and you are going to see the wonderful quality of what we have produced. I dare you try and spot the difference between the real pan and Digital Pan.

Digital Pan is launching right now with five steelpans, we are giving you the high c tenor pan, the low tenor, a double tenor, a four cello, and a six base and we have plans to do nine pans in all. The four additional ones will be the double guitar, the double seconds, the three cello and the tenor bass. We will be staggering the release of those additional pans because we want to keep interest in Digital Pan leading up to Carnival 2012.

Now Digital Pan is not a toy, it’s not just for your children to play the steelpan. We want, as I said that when you get this brilliant idea in the middle of the night, that you are able to record the on steelpan and record what you’re playing, possibly even record what you are playing and send it to a friend. In future releases we want you to be able to record what you’re doing and get the musical score for what you’re doing. As we understand it, composers will sit down on a piano and they have facilities where by they can translate what they are pressing on the piano into a musical score. What we want you to do, in the near future, is to use Digital Pan to produce your musical score.

So, I’m very anxious for you to actual see the great work that we did with Digital Pan but let me just touch a little bit on what is so fantastic about Digital Pan. We have produced high quality sounds, we spent four or five days in the recording studios with Mr. Gill and his guys and as some of you will appreciate, if I go into the recording studio and hit a tenor pan to record a G note, you’re going to hear that stick noise hitting because I don’t know what I’m doing, but these guys are so good that they’ve recorded this audio and you’re not going hear a stick sound at all it’s so clean it’s so well done.

Once those audio files were recorded we went through a process of cleaning those audio files and then we had professional photographers come in and take professional shots of the Gill Masters Series of steelpans. So you are getting very high quality images of the pans. We wanted to give you the ability to record so you could record what you’re doing right there on your iPad or phone and we wanted children to know or people that have not played pan before, we wanted them to know what notes they’re playing on the pan. Is this a C, is it a D, is it an F and so on.

We have been working on Digital Pan in excess of six months and we did a beta program where we allowed people to download Digital Pan and give us some feedback and we got some wonderful feedback. And I just wanted to show you just based on the beta testing, some of the countries that have been download Digital Pan and playing the steelpan around the world. Tunisia, Uruguay, France, Ghana, Peru, Sweden, it’s all over the world. The steelpan is now so easily accessible. I could be anywhere; I can get a moment of inspiration, pull out an iPad, an iPhone, a Windows Phone 7 phone and start playing, start recording.

I would like to invite you to please come and listen and see for yourself what the application Digital Pan has to offer. We have a lot of devices that we brought to show you how the application works on them and also I encourage you to go and see the wonderful craftsmanship of the Gill Master Series of steelpans. I would also encourage you to compare Digital Pan to the physical pans and compare what you are seeing on the device to what you see on the real pans, compare what you are hearing on the physical pans to what you are hearing on Digital Pan. Thank you very much for joining us here today and I hope it’s gotten you excited about what’s happening in the digital age with the steelpan.

God bless you and God bless Trinidad and Tobago. Thank you very much.