Future Man

RoyEl is an inventor, scientist, musician, composer and two time Grammy Award winning performer with Béla Fleck and the Flecktones known as "Future Man". Audiences became curious when RoyEl appeared with Béla Fleck and the Flecktones ten years ago.

At the heart of that music is RoyEl's ground breaking percussion technique performed on his first invention he calls the Drumitar. The guitar shaped Drumitar 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."