On the other hand

My left hand displays unexpected musical talents

My jammer has a pair of symmetrical keyboards – in other words if you play Do-Rae-Mi with the middle, ring and little fingers of the right hand, you canalso play the same notes with the same fingers of the left hand. This means that notes go up away from your body, which totally bewilders some keyboardists – it verges on musical heresy!

However, this symmetry offers a big-time, huge advantage: you only have to work out one fingering for the new keyboard. Just to be sure I briefly tried out the other option – both keyboards going up to the right, but this was horrible - it more than doubled the work, and worse; the left hand just doesn’t work with the jammer scale going the wrong way: the fingerings were killer. Enough said: with the jammer’s Wicki-Hayden key layout the keyboards have to be symmetrical.

Now, while having to work out - and learn - only one fingering is good, the question remains: if one hand learns a pattern, does the other get an inkling of what to play as well? On all instruments I know of this question is moot (unless you practice years enough that the remapping is automatic), so we are into completely new musical (and possibly scientific) territory here.

A bit of background first; I have found that it’s best to have a minimum of 2 sets of music I am learning:

1. A relatively challenging new piece or two.

2. A short set list of songs I know relatively well – 80% or better, but that I can challenge myself to improve on (Rock Band 3 is great at encouragement). This practicing of a whole stream of notes – with immediate feedback of errors - seems to be just superb for skill growth and deep-lock-down. 

So I have played several songs many, many times. One, Centerfold by the J Geils Band.  I can play up to 90+% notes-correct with my eyes  mostly closed (there are some sneaky turns that make it hard to get higher).

How much has seeped through to my left hand? It was simple enough to get the answer: 63% of the notes of the whole song - not just the chorus.

63% is surprising, especially considering that my neglected left hand isn’t as speedy or precise as its brother.  25% I would have though good, 50% excellent, 63% means that the left hand picked up 2/3 of a musical skill effortlessly.

Wow. 

This has implications . . .

Comments

[Ville]

Hi, a PCB for making your own isomorphic keyboard sounds really interesting! Who is Red Davies and where can I find out more about this?

I can be reached at vzizlzlzezgz@gmail.com (remove all z's) or comment here and I will check back..

thanks /V

[Ken Rushton]

I'm back from holidays. It was an nice month in Montreal and Ottawa: lovely cities.

If you are really keen, you can abut two axis-49s, end-to-end, one under each hand, and remap the notes to so that say one hand is the regular note, and the other is the micro-tonal note, perhaps with a thumb control to vary the micro-tuning. This is what I would do, and indeed will be doing, when in the medium-distant future, I have mastered the basics of playing the jammer with normal tuning.

Alternates are few:
1. buy a Axis-64, and remap the keys with to make them micro-tonal - This is certainly do-able, AFAIK, you do have to assign the 3 banks to 3 separate channels, so that each one has a unique value.
John Moriarty and the Alternate Tunings Mailing List are experts at this.

2. buy a Terpstra Keyboard, which is designed for MT work, for 2189 USD / 1789 EUR. 20 have just been promised to be available.

3. It's early yet, but Red Davies has just finished fabbing an really nice PCB for Isometric keyboards these can be tiled together to make a keyboard of any size. By working with him, you could likely make your own, or he could make you one and you could help him in other ways.

Ken.

[Jim Aikin]

I've been searching for alternative MIDI keyboards, and stumbled onto your blog. I have no interest in using an instrument of this sort for standard 12-note-per-octave music -- I'm composing with microtonal scales. And having, I might add, very little luck finding a usable keyboard.

I need a broader layout than the Axis-49, and unfortunately the Axis-64 doesn't allow user programming of individual keys. Can you suggest any resources I might not have noticed? If so, I'd love to hear about them! (You can reach me at midiguru23@sbcglobal.net.) Thanks!

--Jim Aikin