Does the layout of the traditional, “piano” keyboard strike you as weird?
Do you want an advantage over other musicians and look really cool?
I’m starting an Alternate Musical Instrument Special Interest Group (sounds cooler than "Club") in the Greater Vancouver area. Do you:
- really, hugely want to learn an instrument, but don’t because the instrument looks arcane or you’ll be compared to musicians that started years ago
- are non-keyboard musicians: especially guitar players and sax players that want to play a keyboard but don’t because the keyboard is so bloody confusing
- are mediocre keyboardists that want a killer advantage: an instrument that is much faster to play and has many more musical possibilities than the traditional instrument
- are composers that want composition-boosting (instead of confusing) instruments
This is a truly great time in the development of musical instruments. New, intelligently designed ones are coming out; we now have the Daskin (a modernized piano), Dualo Du-touch, Terpstra, LinnStrument and jammer keyboards. All of these are designed to be both easy to learn, fast to play and train the ear accurately. This is not hard - traditional instruments are not designed for any of these things. All of the new instruments have uniform, consistent fingering, that is, if you learn to play a song in a given key, you can play it equally well in all keys, and modulations are easy. Each has unique features.
If these new instruments sound scary-hard to learn, there is now available teaching software that multiplies musical learning speed -and- it works particularly well on the new gadgets.
The group purpose: to check-out these new instruments, share ideas and experiences and hopefully gain extra proficiency in music.
If you are interested, please send an email to [email protected] or drop a comment here.
Great blog. Love music and science although I must admit that although fascinating, your science is a bit out of my league. I do like the pop science too for us mere mortals. This one looks at Musicians Brains (based on the Max Planck study) http://hhhhappy.com/why-guitarists-are-better-than-you-and-now-science-can-prove-it/
Posted by: Stan Charles | Sep 16, 2015 at 04:42 PM