Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Tuner-Technicians Forum Prototype building? For patent pending keyboard

All cool info from clearly a professional and I appreciate your taking part in this discussion.

I didn’t dig through the book to find Janko’s arguments, but I think that having separate rows of whole steps, while providing evenness in a respect, seems less than ideal; I actually find it worse than the heritage keyboard, which at least provides an area where mentally you can try to see the chromatic sequence. (Of course, xylophone players make do somehow, without having much of a chromatic space. . . )

With respect to your worries about tuning, there is really no worry, because all of that can stay around with my invention. Remember mine is not the Dodeka keyboard. You can view it in the way of the heritage keyboard, if you want those tunings to have meaning. You can view it chromatically like Dodeka. You can even view it as two interlaced rows of whole steps, doing justice to Janko’s insight, as with this variant with alternating black and white. You can have your cake and eat it, too.

Sorry, you were looking for practical advice. What I have seen done is to take a grand piano that isn't worth repairing and to construct a new experimental action. If a planar key arrangement is what you're after, you could just have a keyboard constructed on top of the existing key levers. If you want a non-pivoting action, it could be built above the hammer line, but you would have to use a clavichord tangent -- unless Morris Steinert was right and a non-escapement action will work on a piano (see Steinertone). A straight-down clavichord action, with the keys returned by leaf springs, would be a simple carpentry project.

I may eventually have to do a project like that in order to have a prototype, and definitely that kind of suggestion makes sense considering that I posted this topic in the technicians forum. But I think the value of the invention is so plain that I might be able to get some people on board to go straight to something more marketable: an electronic keyboard/organ (with the usual injection molded keys etc).

(Furthermore I’m actually a van dweller without even an apartment let alone a garage (though if need be I could move a few hundred miles to use my parents’ tools and garage.))

I do not see any value in this. The rear natural keys would be difficult to use without accidentally hitting the middle sharps. So that is just useless.

No. Maybe that would be a good step, especially if the whole key changed color when pressed.

The idea is not even to use the rear natural keys (though they could help in certain passages no doubt). It is about the proprioception.

This thread has become a sort of defense of the value of my invention, not unlike a dissertation defense, and I think that is great and I appreciate everyone’s participation. This is exactly the kind of vetting this idea needs in order to prove its worth.

To the topic of proprioception consider what Harvey Diamond says in this video at 7:37 about how one gets a very special feeling when playing chords pressing the white notes up close to or in between the black notes. This is about getting a more equal, more chromatically linear control of and feel for the white notes with the black notes. So, it stands to reason that making the notes even more equal, as is achieved in a game-changing way with my invention, will enhance the effect this artist desires.



Consider also the similarity my invention has with this practice chart, voted best practice chart by NAMM. (My patent attorney found this for me). As I’ve said, I believe that certain students grasp the linearity of the keyboard better than others, and I believe the former greatly outperform the latter in their learning and interest in continuing to work, and I believe this mirror aspect helps greatly in suggesting that linearity. Practice chart on Amazon

I would venture to bet that students who begin lessons on a piano with a shiny fallboard that sits at 90 degrees from the keys, as is common on grand pianos (or students who have some formative experience on such a piano), outperform students who lack experiences on such a piano.

It’s with this thinking that I took this photo when I noticed that the reflection creates an appearance almost as if a prototype of my invention:

You share some knowledge of Chopin but it is clear that you are not a very advanced player. This is how the keyboard looks to an advanced player, one who can transpose anything.

Indeed my invention is perfect for people like you. The black keys are just like the marked frets of a guitar neck! Who would ever say that using those frets “sounds different”? A breathtaking sad misunderstanding of the musical keyboard — but unfortunately an extremely widespread one!

Video demonstration of first key of prototype which I have just constructed. Notice noise reduction in second part due to an improvement. Notice excellent repetition and smoothness of operation even when pressed at ends. I would love to show the mechanism underneath but I don’t have confidence that it’s okay to show given the related patent issues.

Slightly off topic: Years ago, one of my friends wanted to develop a computer game with me. He would come up with the concept, he said, and I would write all the code and do all the artwork. We would share the profits equally. You can be sure I never took him up on his offer! Thanks, but no thanks! Every clown thinks they can “design” a product, not realising how much work is involved in development and re-iterating on a concept!

My advice: don’t be like my friend. If you believe your idea has merit, pay somebody to build a prototype, or be like Steve Jobs and go 50/50 with your future Woz. Put your money where your mouth is.

You have many more hurdles than simply getting the prototype to work feasibly... The whole piano realm (mfg.'s, performers, techs, etc.) are accustomed to the current operation and feel of the already-existing keys. I really don't think your efforts (in this particular area) are going to be worth your time, as it is not going to revolutionize the 200+ year-old industry. Unless you can convince a mfg to produce your desing- which would involve major change in current operation set-up, you won't even get off the ground with the idea.
It simply will not prove to be worth it for such a small factor in the piano design.
That's my opinion anyway.

Charles,

I can easily see this done on an electronic keyboard. You definitely need to have a working model with at least an octave or two, actually operating a musical scale, for anyone to truly evaluate it.

The obstacles in the way for an acoustic piano are basically leverage, touch control, and repetition (oh and durability...significant hurdles. However if your working invention were to make some famous musicians go gaga on an electronic unit, you might be able to get the backing to solve the above problems.

Pwg

LOL, some piano techs can sometimes be cranky or pessimistic but loveable.

But silly, too . . . You say your friend offered 50/50 but you recommend that I offer 50/50.

My guess is you didn’t think your friend’s idea was all that great. If it had been great and you thought you’d get rich you probably would have wanted to do that work. Getting an offer to work with someone on a good original idea is an opportunity! They are sharing their good fortune of coming up with the idea with you.

As you say, that’s your view. My conviction is that this is the greatest innovation in musical keyboardry in at least 500 years. As inexpensive electronic instruments it could revive societal musical literacy — it could be under every Christmas tree one season soon. As an acoustic instrument it could solve the industry’s problem of market saturation by making millions of existing instruments undesirable.



This comment actually stirred anger in me, but I understand that there can be a lack of understanding between people who have different experiences. Either you are not a proficient pianist, or you are proficient but you take for granted things you learned as a toddler and don’t appreciate how hard won competence on a standard piano keyboard is. I want to say: what do you think we do, when we practice twelve hours a day? There is a huge difference between a standard keyboard and this keyboard!!

As Michel Petricciani said, for a good pianist the keyboard becomes “transparent”. What he means is that through many hours of daily interaction you develop a 3D mental map of how the action works (even though you aren’t seeing it), including things as subtle as the way the back parts of the tops of the black keys move forward when they are depressed.

What this means is that a keyboardist learns a lot of idiosyncrasies. My invention eliminates a whole host of these idiosyncrasies. (Additional ones: the fulcrums of the levers on a melodica or mellotron are in one line, while those in a piano are not).

Ha, Charles, you caught me out! I was offered 50/50, thought it was unreasonable since I would be doing all the heavy lifting and then told you to offer the same cut. Something is very wrong with my thinking.

Ha! That’s kind of you to concede; also however, maybe I should have been more charitable and considered that maybe your friend hadn’t put all that much work into his idea, while maybe you could tell that I have put a lot of work into mine.

Maybe you can demo some of your ideas with a sponge keyboard connected to a virtual instrument on your computer. The Haken Continuum playing surface provides a lot more than simple note velocity but you can ignore the extended functionality for now.

Now that is seriously cool! I like it.

Pwg

I’m aware of the Continuum and view it as potential competition; I’m hoping my keyboard offers better connection with the inherited world of piano and maybe is better for fingering in various passages.

I guess I can reveal that in the demo video I posted above, the spring action is actually provided by a Roland Juno-D that is situated about a foot below. The key I press is pressing the top C. (I chose the Roland in part because the spring action is pretty firm and so it easily works with the added weight of the upper mechanism.). I could have just plugged the Roland in and turned it on and the key would have been making sound, would have velocity sensitivity etc. (I was preoccupied with my excitement at getting the parallel motion to work and so the sound seemed of secondary importance.)

Update: I now have more than half octave fully functional (F to C) as shown in the video below. Some notes:
- In order to even more fully emphasize the equality of the twelve keys I lengthened the area where white and black share space and made the wide white areas quite short.
- A normal keyboard shows that it privileges C in that the top key is full width all the way back. In order to show that my keyboard is foremost approaching the 12 tones equally, I cut that top note narrow in the 12 tone region, as visible in the video.
- “MTE Keyboard” is my new working name for this invention, standing for Million Times Easier Keyboard.