Re: MIDI key transducers (physical)
Re: MIDI key transducers (physical)
- Subject: Re: MIDI key transducers (physical)
- From: "James Chandler Jr" <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 26 Sep 2007 10:21:45 -0400
A couple of other possibilities for 'easily' making a 'one off' alternate
keyboard, if you don't want to go into mass-production.
I haven't been inside new synths for a couple of years, but a common layout in
the past-- the keyboard 'switch boards' with the rubber nipples can be about one
or two inches wide, using separate circuit boards for each one or two octaves
under the keys. In the past there was often a small sub-board wired to all the
'switch boards' which was responsible for the switch multiplexing.
One might disassemble a cheapie controller keyboard, and rearrange the switch
boards into a square grid rather than longitudinal, and then build a 'mechanic's
nightmare' key configuration so that your new grid of keys will push the right
buttons on the switch boards. One could avoid doing any custom electronics other
than soldering to reconfigure the physical layout of the switches. It would be
the entire guts of the cheapie controller keyboard, physically reconfigured with
different keytops.
For a grid-type keyboard controller, it might be worth looking into the
commercially-available MIDI retrofits available for Chromatic Button Accordions.
I don't know if such retrofits are linear-spaced near the valves, or grid-spaced
near the actual accordion buttons.
Chromatic Button Accordion may be considered a textbook case of 'mechanic's
nightmare' mess of levers to map finger motion into mechanical action.
Similar mechanisms could be used to map an arbitrary grid of keys to a linear
array of switches.
There may be ideas worth borrowing from the CBA keyboard arrangement, regarding
ergonomics of an alternate controller.
There is long historical evidence which proves that a Chromatic Button Accordion
key layout can be played at virtuosic levels without crippling one's hands. A
newly invented keyboard layout design wouldn't have had that 'built-in'
field-testing.
jcjr
From: "Cesare Ferrari" <email@hidden>
As for the physical side of things i'd be looking to bodge from a pair of
existing synth keyboards.
Cesare
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