Terpstra Keyboard
terpstrakeyboard.com
terpstrakeyboard.com
I personally love it, especially as I like to do a lot of improv in various tunings, and the layout makes transposing and thinking about structure so much easier than a traditional keyboard. The terpstra seems similar, not sure what their selling point is over the lumatone.
Edit: oh, it seems that the lumatone is the commercialized version essentially. Great hardware, can reccomend!
Are there any regular typing keyboards with velocity sensitive keys? I genuinely don't know, it's just the first thing I'd compare this to
I'm absolutely not calling it over-priced, just puzzled.
That said! There are people making DIY isomorphic keyboards using hall-effect keyboard switches. None are commercially available right now, but see e.g. the MidiHex at https://gullsonix.co.uk/. You could make one for a fraction of the cost of a lumatone -- but of course it would be a very different instrument.
Yes, a number of the mechanical keyboards that use Hall effect switches let you access the velocity data. Wooting has an official SDK, and there are community-supported drivers for a number of Keychron boards
welcome to Capitalism and Niche Products sir
If you have a well made, but very niche product that sells in very small volumes it will be expensive.
If any of the labour & assembly happens in US that turns it into unavoidable inevitability.
If it was cheaper, it would be a loss making hobby.
A country without "capitalism" wouldn't make such product for sale to begin with.
micro-tonal instruments are prevalent in various cultures which weren't flooded by Europe and then North America by hundreds, if not thousands of years ago. it's pretty easy to find examples on countries inside Africa and Asia
Oh, my sweet summer child; music instrument keys are mechanically not the same thing as a computer keyboard. There are moving parts involved that need to handle routine forces that easily break a normal computer keyboard. 𝆑𝆑𝆑 calls for your whole arm and torso.
Unless you know how many units they sell per month, and what are their expenses exactly, and how many people are employed, and amortized cap ex and R&D cost, you're just making shit up on the spot.
Lets say this thing moves two units per month, and each brings $4000 in pure profit (costs per unit $1000). If company has one employee. Now you've made $96000/yr.
Which is way less than a single competent engineer or entrepreneur in US is worth. Ie. they are losing money.
This is fundamental quality of very low-volume, very niche products. They are almost never priced anywhere near their bill-of-materials cost.
> micro-tonal instruments are prevalent in various cultures which weren't flooded by Europe and then North America by hundreds, if not thousands of years ago. it's pretty easy to find examples on countries inside Africa and Asia
So buy one of those then?
No problemo. The consequence of that law is you'll simply not get those products on the market because there's not enough profit to justify someone spending the time to make them.
See also: Rent control, minimum wage, price control (e.g. maximum price of gasoline during a shortage).
They're probably most prevalent in Europe, though. That's where most microtonal instruments come from.
It's not that long ago that a mechanical keyboard with Hall-effect switches and individually-addressable LEDs would have set you back a couple of grand.
The mechanical keyboard scene has exerted really significant downward pressure on the cost of this sort of thing - something that likely doesn't hit the music world due to lower volumes
The clavinova does have a piano-like body, very very good built in sounds (including binaural for 2 types of piano in mine), and built in speakers, so there’s that.
On the other hand, this one says “built to order” while clavinovas are not.
All this to say that, while expensive, it does not seem outrageous if the keyboard plays good. This one has after touch too, which makes it more comparable with a synth than a digital piano (though I understand this one is just a controller).
How many people would buy this weird thing per month - even at this low price point? 10? 50? 100?
Imagine you're an engineer and your competency is worth $200,000/year. If this retailed at 1/10th - as you suggested - so $500, and lets generously say you make $100usd per unit at this price point.
You have to atleast sell ~166 of these "weird" niche things per month, every month, no exceptions to match. And you're probably not a single person, so way more.
Can you? And why bother?
More importantly, can you even make these things for $400usd when your order quantity is only 166units per month?
And this is after spending years(?) in development, and some non negligible amount of cap ex.
I could definitely imagine a smaller cheap plasticky version of this being pitched as a more intuitive way for kids to learn piano, maybe that's where they're aiming?
It's also worth noting that a piano or piano-like keyboard will be taking _much_ greater impacts than any typist inflicts on a computer keyboard; a music keyboard needs a mechanical action that can properly and rapidly reset the keys, withstanding many rapidly repeated simultaneous heavy strikes.
I would expect the midi fighter with less keys would be somehow easier to control and get better results from.
I love the linnstrument, but, different vibe. More like a 8-string stringed-instrument than a keyboard.
The launchpad/deluge, which are more direct comparisons, are fine, but, I miss the range of a larger instrument.
Further, the amount of keys does not affect the ease of control as the layout of the Lumatone is very regular, so, it could be 100x as long and just as easy to control outside of having to jog between the ends of a hypothetical 30 ft long keyboard, lol.
From the same makers or others?
On the website I can find no info whether this project is concluded or not.
This is different from a linear layout like a traditional piano. Note above that the D major triad has an F# which means it is played on one of the piano's black keys, while the C major triad does not have a sharp, which means it is played entirely on the white keys. You have to keep track of which particular chord you are playing in order to know whether you need a black key or a white key. This means the shape you play to get each major triad is different, so a traditional piano is not an isomorphic ("same shape") layout.
Guitars are also isomorphic (when all the strings being played are fretted) and may be easier to think about. If you imagine fretting the lowest two strings at the 5th fret and playing them both, and then moving your finger up one fret on both strings, the interval between each of those two groupings of notes is the same - you've moved them each up one step, but the difference between them stays the same based on however the strings are tuned. Similar to this keyboard, on a guitar you can learn the shape of a (fully fretted) major triad, and then move that shape anywhere on the neck to play any major triad.
Accordion bass buttons work the same way. Looks confusing if you don't have any idea what's going on, but it's actually very intuitive and easy to learn and play.
[1] Piano accordion on top, button accordion with isomorphic layout on bottom: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_converter_free-bas...
[0] that is, ~"scales"; usually all buttons will be working
It looked pretty slick, not the usual homebrewed raggy-edge crap. Someone had clearly spent quite a lot of money on getting *exactly* what they wanted.
Here a simulation
Physicists may particularly appreciate that someone made a distorted isomorphic keyboard layout that implements 5-limit just intervals and it ends up being a quasicrystal. While not a true isomorphic, it certainly draws connections that I don't otherwise get to talk about on HN much, and if one were to take the 7-JI 3-D quasicrystal and combine it with a webcam theremin, I'm sure the results would be entertaining. https://old.reddit.com/r/microtonal/comments/1l1m0e6/quasiis...
Caftaphata is one woman's ten year project to create a conlang ('constructed language') that converts human mandibular positions into 5-D chords and builds a tetris-block language of phonetic rules out of them. There are maybe twenty videos posted so far presenting each stage of the grammar and construction patterns. Each chord is a word constructed by plain rules. Studying these videos since they launched a year ago is what led me to learn about isomorphic keyboards. The accompanying instructional videos also have the distinction of being narrated fully in Lisatopian (the creator's first conlang), so not only sound but also subtitles end up being required. This is the Caftaphata intro video; 5 minutes, sound is mandatory and may feel dissonant at times: https://youtu.be/cMnuMjXeHrY
It seems like this can get you from zero to the equivalent of picking up a few chords and how to strum on guitar fairly quickly. But I would be curious what mastery of this instrument looks like? If you were the Oscar Peterson or Franz Liszt of this thing, how would the layout limit or enable you?
A recent product concept, computer keyboard with function keys arranged like piano keys.
Also intersects music, technology and keyboard layout, but from a different angle.
Edit: it seems it's doing so on Firefox, but not on Edge.
If you got a product to demonstrate, have the dignity to use HTTPS. With a remotely exploitable vulnerability in Google Chrome V8 in the wild, all the more reason to. Even though I am using Mozilla Firefox, there's probably some Chromium-based software I use.