Chompi Sampling Keyboard Firmware Meets End Of Road, But May Go Open Source
Chase Bliss has announced that they are no longer pursuing an v1.5 update to the CHOMPI sampling keyboard. The cute and colorful sampler launched by manufacturer Chompi Club in 2023 following a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign.
Effects pedal brand Chase Bliss acquired Chompi Club in 2025 with the intention of continuing product development and manufacturing Chompi itself, but has now made the decision to cease production of the instrument.
After merging with Chompi Club, Chase Bliss planned to produce a backwards-compatible Chompi with the same processor and slightly different hardware, meaning that owners of any Chompi would have access to the same firmware.
“That turned out to be a pretty bad idea,” Chase Bliss said, for reasons explained in a video shared on the company’s YouTube channel titled “We changed our mind”.
The announcement in the video is a little ambiguous, but what’s clear is that the company has shelved plans to develop and release a Chase Bliss-made Chompi or to work with Chompi Club on a second version.
“We are not working on that Chompi thing we described in the other video, or Chompi V2,” Chase Bliss founder Joel Korte said. “We’ll do one firmware patch for Tempo to address a few minor bugs but beyond that, nothing else directly in Chompi world is planned,” he added in the comments.
Appearing alongside Chompi Club co-founder Tobias Hendrickson, Korte told viewers that Chompi’s Tempo firmware – an alternative version of Chompi’s firmware released in March that fundamentally changed how the instrument worked, adding an arpeggiator and sample-slicing functionality – took longer than expected to develop and caused the team to run into the limitations of the device’s hardware and processing power.
“The manufacturing process was also turning into a bit of a puzzle, and so we found ourselves in the position of essentially recreating an existing product that was already maxed out,” Korte explains in the video description. “It would have been time-consuming, expensive, and limiting for future ideas. It just didn’t make sense.”
“We just can’t really do what we would’ve wanted to do on the existing architecture,” Korte added in the comments.
“For me, this is not in any way a sad thing that we’re reaching this conclusion,” Hendrickson said. “As it is now, Chompi is complete. I don’t know how excited I am about making another one that has to stick to those same constraints.”
Chase Bliss will continue to provide support for those that already own a Chompi, and as of the video’s publication, the company has 250 units remaining and there is still stock available on the Chase Bliss website.
Though Chase Bliss has made it clear that Chompi as we know it is being discontinued, Chompi Club’s Chelsea and Tobias Hendrickson will be remaining with Chase Bliss, and Korte says the engineering team is currently working on more than 10 new projects.
The company says that it is exploring the possibility of making the firmware open source, saying that it’s ‘the right move’.
