Updated Jan 7, 2009
A fool, it is said, is a person that does not know what they are doing, but does it anyway, in blissful ignorance of their incompetence.
A true fool, on the other hand, is a person that knows that he doesn't know what he is doing, but does it anyway, in willful defiance of his sorry ignorance.
I am certainly the latter. While I am waiting for my Axis-49 keyboard to arrive (my wonderful wife has granted it to me as what will be a very late Christmas present), for the edification of those amazingly dedicated souls (*) that read my postings, for my own education, and to possibly even save some time, I am attempting to work out the dynamics of the Axis keyboard strictly on theory and from my experience with the jammer keyboard's Wicki-Hayden layout.
Do not take what follows as being anywhere complete or especially insightful, and as always, all mistakes are mine. Any correct details are likely the product of chance and/or the feedback of my critics.
(*) Believe it or not: approximately weekly, some new true masochist (not a web-crawler) reads through a large portion of this site.
Harmonic Table: From elegant simplicity to surprising complexity
I've mined the web, especially the C-Thru site and Peter Davies' Opal site for information on the Harmonic Table keyboard layout, and have found mostly tantalizing hints.
What I crave is the fine details of how to play the Axis keyboard and which nifty things that I can do, once one appears in my fevered fingers.
I'm looking for the practical working instructions, like I'd get if I went to a good guitar teacher, along with hints as to what I can do with a little practice. Jordan Rudess has a nice presentation, but it lacks the "Axis-Keyboard-for-Dummies" approach needed for keyboard novices such as I.
The raw basics
When presented with an innovative, totally new device like the Axis 64/49 and the “Harmonic Table” layout. The mind takes a while to sort out the salient new features.
First lets take a look at the key-field and get a feel for the larger features:
First, the basic unit of music - the notes in a octave as they can be grouped on an Axis keyboard. I've coloured the notes of the major scale and marked in the musician's names for the notes.
At first the notes look a bit daunting to learn, but it's not really too bad, with a good, practical mapping to one's fingers.
Many notes that often be played together are close and can be played with one finger. (I'll talk about playing later, in a separate posting).
There is a slightly odd gap of notes (white on this diagram, black on the Axis keyboards) which one normally will want to avoid playing with the others. Whimsically, I call this the Gutter of Dissonance.
Basic Axii:
Right next to each note is an harmonic adjoining note, unlike on the piano, where the adjacent notes are normally almost never played at the same time.
The Fifth
This keyboard layout is totally nuts about the 5ths; everything pivots around them. In most music the 5th has a very special relationship with the key (the root note) of the piece. It is in many ways a secondary key center. On this keyboard simply by moving up a key row does this shift. That's all that's needed.
The replacement of the conventional octave as the dominant musical center (paradigm) in a musician's mind may be the single greatest advantage of this keyboard. It's different, but still profoundly musical. The octave notes are so like the root note that they are boring.
To give just one example: a cool thing one can do on this keyboard is tune the fifth perfectly, rather than temper (flatten) it to fit the octave scale. (if you do this, the octave will be a bit (~2% of a semi-tone) sharp, which is not a grave musical sin, just slightly scandalous, and therefore interesting).
Another, more important example: many pieces of music involve establishing a pattern, then once it is established in the listener's ear, tweaking it in a musical way, so that the harmonics invoked change in simple ways. Thus we musicians keep our listeners interested. The trick is to do this in the aforementioned "musical way". That's the power of this keyboard, as it is wrapped around and deeply embedded in musical theory.
Tip: if you have learned a neat pattern, turn your hand 60 degrees. The same pattern should sound (mostly) musical and may (I suspect) sound interesting. You can repeat this until you have gone all the way around; in theory, 6 pieces can be learned for the price of one.
The Thirds
Also used everywhere in music is the Major Third and Minor Third intervals. If you learn a pattern and shift it diagonally one note over in any direction you will sound, quite literally, jazzy. That is what jazz musicians do in jazz (caveat alert: this is just one of several tricks used).
What I think will work: shift the hand up, down, sideways etc. for just a moment (one chord, one or two bars), then snap back.
Ridges and gutters:
There are distinct lines of consonance and dissonance (white keys and black keys) in this keyboard. Which makes sense: the consonant notes are grouped together, consequently the dissonant notes are also grouped.
In my diagrams, I've given the "white notes" a unique colour and coloured the black keys white, as this makes the coloured notes stand out better.
Based on my experience the the jammer's Wick-Hayden layout, I strongly recommend that the keys on the Axis be coloured.
Missing Axii
It's often the case that an improvement in one respect comes at an cost in other ways. So it is with the Harmonic Table layout:
The musically important intervals of Octave and Fourth are nearly "Missing In Action". This may make playing normal music harder.
Confirmation from some Axis-64 users: yup; playing inversions is indeed harder.
Semi-tones and Whole-Tones:
Major (and Minor) scales :
The major Scale and it's close cousin, the Minor Scale have profound reasons for existing (one day I will get up the nerve to try to explain it - it's not that hard).. Besides, western music is written around it and imbeds it totally, and that's what the instrument must play.
How does it do?
Not bad; not bad at all. To the right I show, I hope clearly, what I guess is the commonest way to play these scales, showing a numbered ascending sequence on the left side, and the fingers needed on the right.
This pattern must be utterly become a part of the soul of a musician playing this instrument well.
Note that the distance traveled to play is measured in millimeters and scant centimeters, while on a piano, it is a factor of 10 greater or more. This should translate to a huge improvement in playing speed.
Other observations;
Octave Units :
Around the octave one is playing, is clustered other clusters of octaves, but because an octave unit on the Axis is 6.5 notes wide and less than 2 notes high, the octave units abut in a different way.
The thumb seems to be seldom needed. The thumb has an awkward shape and is awkwardly placed (except to play bass, perhaps) to be used on the smallish hexagonal keys of the board. Note that Jordan Rudess' in his demos seldom uses his thumb. Addendum: Jordan confirms this.
I believe this is actually an great advantage. Jordan loves using the mod wheels but has to stop playing with his left hand to use them - amazingly bad ergonomics."You are right that it is harder to play the instrument with your
thumb. I sometimes will use it though for certain musical situations."
Imagine what he could do with a better thumb-control such as I prototyped here:
One can also "slice up" the notes in other ways.
Zones:
Here's another way to group the notes. On the Axis-64, the key-field can be broken up into 3 Zones, each 7 columns wide.
Playing the Keyboard:
Interestingly, the keyboard has 2 primary fingerings.
Take the right hand, one can put the index finger or the little finger on the root note.
With the index finger on the root, one plays the notes on the right of the root.
With the ring finger on the root (the "Second Position"), one plays the same notes on different keys on the left of the root.
When one plays the major scale, for example, I predict one normally would use both, alternating between them as you go up or down.
For more details, see the next posting.
Appendix:
The picture to the left is from C-Thru's Coloured Octave map. It shows the slightly canted "axis of unison" well.
Grooveagent66 in the C-Thru forum, :
(Re: Playing Techniques) made (also see here) this larger diagram for me:
Good Questions.
Re Glassando: they are easy to do, but just not a C-major "white keys" glissando.
On Thummer/jammer (wicki layout) one has, obviously, the ability to do a "glis" of seconds, fifths and fourths, as well as more exotic ones by going getween rows, e.g. straight up (root, 4&5, octave) - this one sounds neat & clean! I haven't tried it (my keys are a bit too stiff), but one could do a straight across wholetone + a fifth (kinda chromatic) too.
Re: portamento (like on a violin?) - you need a jamstick for this.
Re: Key size. on the Janko you need a shape that is easy to find with both the thumb-side and the finger-tips , and a row for the thumb & seperate a row for the fingers. My guess is that a 35 mm deep by 22 mm wide key set up.
Note that the chomatone doubles the rows up and makes the keys half as high.
Re weight: the downweight should be 40-50 grams. This is far more that the weight of the keys. A much more significant problem is leverage effects making the top row require a lot more downweight than the end of the bottom.
Ken.
Posted by: MusicScienceGuy | Jan 22, 2009 at 01:12 PM
Ken, have you figured out a way to execute a glissando/portamento on a Jammer or C-thru or any other instrument with a isomorphic layout? I've been thinking about how to do it on a original Janko keyboard (not the Chromatone-312 - they seem to have provided a way to execute a chromatic glissando on that thing). I am still stumped, still trying to imagine how Paul von Janko, Rubenstein or Liszt might have performed it in their time.
On a different note, it seems to me that what are considered "full-sized" white keys come in two lengths - 6" or 5.5". So I reckon the most Janko rows that can be made out of midi keyboards is four if the keycaps were cut out to 1.5" in length each (or alternatively, 1.5" for the keycaps for the bottom two rows and 1.25" for the top two rows - similar to Paul Hirsch's beanboard design). Needless to say, this does not allow space for "chromatic glissando" row like the Chromatone's, unless the keys are extended by 1"-1.5" resulting in a length between 6.5" and 7.5".
My concern is that this extra length would translate to extra key weight causing the key to sag or dip. This would mean having to look into either replacing the springs at the back with ones with higher tensile capacity (thicker springs?) and/or use stabilizing springs underneath the keys.
Posted by: Troy | Jan 20, 2009 at 10:36 AM