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I went down the QMK keyboard rabbit hole a few years ago. I ended up with four Leopold FC660C keyboards with topre switches and Hasu QMK controllers, and a clos

I went down the QMK keyboard rabbit hole a few years ago. I ended up with four Leopold FC660C keyboards with topre switches and Hasu QMK controllers, and a closet full of unused mechanical keyboard alternatives I should sell. I never took to full chording; few people have. However, nearly everything I type that isn't a simple letter involves holding a key near home row with one hand, while tapping a key near home row with the other hand. This is a quadratic expansion of the address space, in direct conflict with N-key rollover. QMK support for "tap/hold" is imperfect, as is human dexterity, but for me this "one finger each hand" chording is a complete game changer. I've learned and unlearned keymaps such as Dvorak, which get all the attention but only matter if one is typing a novel. For programming and interacting with many programs that expect "control-xylophone" combinations, mapping all actions to finger pairs wins. It's inconceivably natural (as in, why hasn't this been the standard since electronic keyboards?) once one gets used to it. Electric pianos are now prevalent, yet they're modeled on an ancient physical device that maps keys to single notes. People joke about the inertia of the QWERTY typewriter layout, but the standard piano key mapping is the elephant in the room here. Where is the experimentation corresponding to the thriving QMK keyboard rabbit hole? For HN readers like me who would learn piano mid-life from scratch, what are the best electric pianos that can be fully hacked via open source software, in the same spirit as QMK?

NikolaNovak 5y ago
>>The standard piano key mapping is the elephant in the room here. Where is the experimentation corresponding to the thriving QMK keyboard rabbit hole? There has been some experimentation with Isomorphic keyboards on and off over last 150 years. But like with QWERTY, the legacy of what grouchy old white Austrian males left us with in the 18th century is hard to shed :O (I've started fully nerding out about learning music late in life, and it's been a mix of enlightenment and frustration. The clefs & notation system, the piano keyboard, they're all seemingly designed to beat any sense of intuition and understanding out of you, and have you memorize by rote things that you could have otherwise just understood. )
ianthehenry 5y ago
I linked to some isomorphic keyboards in production at the end of the post. A couple more that I'm aware of: https://www.striso.org/ https://www.striso.org/ https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joyst/joyst-jv-1-joystick-midi-controller-with-full-mpe https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joyst/joyst-jv-1-joysti... There's also the "thummer" from many many years ago, but I don't think it ever went anywhere. > For HN readers like me who would learn piano mid-life from scratch, what are the best electric pianos that can be fully hacked via open source software, in the same spirit as QMK? I don't have an answer for this question, but you can go pretty far with playing around in software. MIDI is basically just an event protocol like `{ note: 23, velocity: 99 }`, and you can respond to the events however you want from music synthesis software. I've used a SuperCollider front-end called Overtone to remap my Axis-49 into various layouts -- it's fun having a full programming language available so you can do dumb things. There's a pretty big community of people making Arduino-powered MIDI controllers as well, so lots of resources if you did want to hack your own from scratch. Also, regarding chording the other kind of keyboard: you might find this older project of mine interesting. https://ianthehenry.com/posts/peggi/ https://ianthehenry.com/posts/peggi/

NikolaNovak 5y ago

>>The standard piano key mapping is the elephant in the room here. Where is the experimentation corresponding to the thriving QMK keyboard rabbit hole? There has been some experimentation with Isomorphic keyboards on and off over last 150 years. But like with QWERTY, the legacy of what grouchy old white Austrian males left us with in the 18th century is hard to shed :O (I've started fully nerding out about learning music late in life, and it's been a mix of enlightenment and frustration. The clefs & notation system, the piano keyboard, they're all seemingly designed to beat any sense of intuition and understanding out of you, and have you memorize by rote things that you could have otherwise just understood. )

ianthehenry 5y ago

I linked to some isomorphic keyboards in production at the end of the post. A couple more that I'm aware of: https://www.striso.org/ https://www.striso.org/ https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joyst/joyst-jv-1-joystick-midi-controller-with-full-mpe https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joyst/joyst-jv-1-joysti... There's also the "thummer" from many many years ago, but I don't think it ever went anywhere. > For HN readers like me who would learn piano mid-life from scratch, what are the best electric pianos that can be fully hacked via open source software, in the same spirit as QMK? I don't have an answer for this question, but you can go pretty far with playing around in software. MIDI is basically just an event protocol like `{ note: 23, velocity: 99 }`, and you can respond to the events however you want from music synthesis software. I've used a SuperCollider front-end called Overtone to remap my Axis-49 into various layouts -- it's fun having a full programming language available so you can do dumb things. There's a pretty big community of people making Arduino-powered MIDI controllers as well, so lots of resources if you did want to hack your own from scratch. Also, regarding chording the other kind of keyboard: you might find this older project of mine interesting. https://ianthehenry.com/posts/peggi/ https://ianthehenry.com/posts/peggi/