The Arcade Chord Control turns your gamepad into a real-time harmony engine. Map scales, voices, and tension to physical sticks — then perform like never before.
Drag a dot across the pad — every position is a harmonically valid chord. Built for performers and producers who want to focus on music, not theory. Four voices, looper, arpeggiator, and full MIDI routing built in.
Harmony shouldn't live behind a theory wall. It should be something you feel from the first note.
Harmony shouldn't be a gate you pass through after decades of practice. It should be a playground — something you feel, explore, and own from the moment you touch it.
Dimea Arcade builds instruments that give everyone direct, physical access to harmony. Move a joystick. Change a scale. Play something beautiful. Whether you've been playing for thirty years or thirty minutes.
Dimitri Dähler is a jazz trumpet player, producer, and sound engineer trained at the Hochschule Luzern. Raised in a household of classical musicians, he grew up between jazz and hip hop — performing, producing, searching for new sounds.
The origin of Dimea Arcade was a single challenge: "I wanted chords to improvise over on my trumpet. People told me modular can't do chords. So I built one that could."
That Eurorack rig — an XY joystick at the centre, patched through VCOs, filters and envelopes — became the instrument he brought to his masterproject performance. Slow chord textures. Live trumpet over self-generated harmony. All improvised. The audience called it mesmerizing.
From that moment came a question: why should this only be possible for someone willing to spend years building a modular? Why can't anyone — producer, performer, beginner — have this? The plugin is the first answer. The hardware is the next.
"I was at exactly the place I'd been searching for years.
— Dimitri Dähler
A PS5-sized chord synthesizer. Two joysticks, pressure-sensitive trigger pads, back triggers, internal looper, standalone synth engine — no screen, no menu diving, no computer. Bringing harmony to the people.
This didn't start as a product. It started as a vision.
Every musician knows the feeling: you have an idea, but before you can play it you're opening a DAW, selecting a plugin, clicking through presets, drawing MIDI notes. By the time the computer is ready, the moment is gone.
DIMEOLA is the opposite of that. It's a chord synthesizer you hold in your hands — no screen, no menus, no setup. Two joysticks map your fingers directly to harmony. Press a button, change the scale. Move left, move right — the music follows.
The goal isn't to build another MIDI controller. It's to make harmonic improvisation as immediate and physical as playing a guitar. Bring it on stage. Clip it to your belt. Play.
One email when the campaign goes live — plus an early-backer discount. No spam, ever.
No hardware yet? No problem. The DIMEA app turns any iOS or Android touchscreen into a fully functional DIMEOLA controller — with the same scale engine, XY pad, and looper from the plugin.
When you do get the hardware, the app becomes its brain — a visual editor for scales, presets, firmware updates, and routing.
Work in progress, concerts, studio sessions. An honest look at what it takes to build something new — from first prototype to stage.
The plugin is available now. Hardware and app are in development — more products coming in 2026.
More products in development — hardware and app coming in 2026.