Futureman is an inventor, scientist, musician, composer and five time Grammy Award winning performer with Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, a band that also featured his bass virtuoso brother Victor. At the heart of the Flecktones' music is Futureman's ground breaking percussion technique performed on his first invention he calls the Drumitar. The guitar shaped instrument allows him to replicate sounds of an entire contemporary drum kit with just a few fingers.
His desire to play with the greatest possible emotional sensitivity has led to his new creation, the "RoyEl" - an instrument shaped like a piano upon which he is composing music for the new century. This music employs the power and science of Mother Nature to attain the natural ratios of the Golden Means (Phi) and the keyboard is styled after the table of the periodic elements. It's no accident, he said, that the RoyEl resembles a keyboard since "More and more I see the piano like a drum set and the drum set like a piano."
