Whether you’re a rock star pining for the days when live concerts resume, a recreational artist who only occasionally belts out a tune, or a passive enthusiast tapping your feet to the radio, it’s highly likely that Music Tribe makes a product that enhances your life. 

With more than 20,000 retailers and distributors in 134 countries, the company is one of the world’s leading designers and manufacturers of professional audio equipment, musical instruments and related products. Music Tribe is the parent company behind the following popular brands: 

In addition to professional audio equipment, Music Tribe is also venturing into developing audio enhancement technology for the video gaming industry.

“For a mechanical engineer, the feeling you get when you see a virtually designed product become a real physical product is like being at Disneyland,” says Jason Blanco, Innovation Development Mechanics Leader at Music Tribe. “We’re now even redesigning all our 20-year-old legacy products from analog to digital to ensure all our designs are on one single MCAD platform which is important for service purposes. It’s really been an amazing transformation.” 

Finding the Harmony of Built-In Data Management

Music Tribe relies on Onshape’s built-in version control to help its globally distributed mechanical engineering team
better keep track of design iterations and speed up the product development process.

Music Tribe’s recent transformation includes their MCAD consolidation from three different file-based on-premise systems to cloud-based Onshape, the only SaaS product development platform that combines robust CAD tools with real-time collaboration and built-in data management.

The switch was motivated by Music Tribe founder Uli Behringer’s stated “Customer and Digital Obsession Vision” to completely move the company to cloud productivity tools whenever possible. “His ambitious vision is that in the future, we’ll be able to do all our work with just our mobile phones from anywhere. Being able to work from home right now is a big step toward that. This was Uli’s goal long before the pandemic, but the pandemic has tremendously fast-tracked that vision,” Blanco says. 

Music Tribe now has close to 50 CAD users located all over the world. When the engineering team was previously using three different on-premise CAD systems, two of them had an external Product Data Management (PDM) system and one of them didn’t – a recipe for organizational chaos. 

“The price point per user of Onshape with its built-in version control is actually the same price as its counterpart without the file management system,” says Blanco. “The decision to switch was an easy one.” 

“We design over 400 concurrent products and maintain close to 10,000 library items. It’s important that we’re able to keep track of each product and component in the pipeline,” he adds. “Onshape has cut our design time in half with the help of automated version control and real-time data management. Documents in Onshape’s library are presented in a very intuitive way that allows us to spend less time sifting through files with more focus on actual design work.” 

Real-Time Collaboration, No Waiting 

Onshape’s real-time collaboration tools allow Music Tribe’s mechanical and system engineers around the world to always stay in close touch when working on the latest professional audio equipment design. The cloud platform enables multiple engineers to simultaneously work together on 3D models and whenever a team member makes a design change, everyone else on the team can instantly follow. A comprehensive edit history tracker records who made what change and when. 

“Onshape saves us tremendous time for all our design reviews,” notes Blanco. “Everybody on the call can simply open the design files with our screens shared and go over proposed changes in real time. The old way of doing design reviews was very manual and time consuming.” 

“As Music Tribe continues to move towards an extreme digital workspace, Onshape’s agile cloud platform becomes even more of an advantage for us as it’s completely aligned with our Digital Obsession Vision,” he adds.

If you'd like to learn more about Onshape's real-time collaboration, download the eBook, "The New Collaboration: A Guide to Transforming Product Design."