Trying to play an isomorphic piano (2022) [video]

I've had a few chromatic button accordions but never got gud. The layout is a delight to me... you can freeze your fingers in some position that sounds good and then just scoot it around and it sounds great anywhere. Such a cool instrument. Unfortunately, I have a fairly well-damaged right shoulder from RA and just wearing the damned things was too much for me. Maybe in another lifetime I'll learn that solo from "Cold Cold Ground." (which I think was on a diatonic, but whatever)

The first major isomophic keyboard, Jankó's, was allegedly praised by Liszt. But not enough for him to start all over again.

Jankó was a more than competent pianist himself, and had thought about these issues. You can reach everything you can on a normal keyboard and many things you can't, and the multiple ways to play the same tone gives plenty of ways to solve fingering challenges as well. The problem is no one is used to it, and no one wants to start out with it since instruments with the layout are extremely rare.

There is a lot of great music written before the classical period that used unorthodox keyboards. Quarter comma mean tone with 15 notes per octave instead of today's 12 was fairly popular and a lot of music from then doesn't sound right on modern keyboards. For that matter much modern music sounds bad but we are used to it. (and 15 notes per octave is a compromise itself, but they didn't know how to build micro tonal keyboards)

Music for an instrument co-evolves with the instrument itself. If an isomorphic piano pushes music co-evolved with a conventional layout out of reach, it would equally bring music that hasn't been written because it works poorly with a conventional layout but works with the isomorphic layout into reach. And yet some other layout would push some things out of reach but bring other things into reach.

Which is to say, it isn't a surprise that music co-evolved with a particular instrument might be difficult on some other one; it's the expected, perfectly normal, perfectly predictable result, and isn't really a criticism of the new instrument. Unless you're willing to equally criticize the conventional instrument for all the music it can't play very well, but then, even so, it's a very symmetric criticism in the end and doesn't amount to much.

I am far from professional playing but I think it is a rite de passage for every piano player going from

"What was wrong with the people who came up with this layout"

to

"These asymmetries are more blessing than curse".

To add a little context. To the layman a piano keyboard looks pretty regular, there is only this slight oddity with a block two and a block of three black keys.

For the player on the other hand this slight irregularity makes almost everything kind of irregular in a sense. For example if you play all the all white key triads you get mostly minor and major triads - mostly because one of them is diminished chord. Or if you look at the patterns of black and white keys when you move a certain chord type through all the keys - it's a mess.

But it's a mess you can memorize and as a reward you will never get lost.

I think trying to make an isomorphic <existing instrument> is a bit of a dead end. What has worked better is synthesizers like the Synthstrom Deluge which have isomorphic keyboards built from the ground up.

Like decimal time, this ~might be a decent idea but it's simultaneously brain breaking.

I don’t know of any comparisons, but anecdotally, I play both piano and button accordion and my guess is that piano keys would be easier for beginners, due to the direct mapping to sheet music. Beginners start in C major using just the white keys and then added sharps or flats are the black keys. (Then you learn to play in other keys, but gradually.)

A chromatic button accordion has other compensating advantages but I don’t find either one easier overall. They’re just different. You get better with practice.

The only thing such keyboards are good for is transposing, and this one doesn't even help for all transpositions, only half of them. So you can learn something in one key, and then pretty easily play it in one of 5 other keys (note that transposing from e.g. C to D is trivial, but C to G is not). But that's about it.

It might have some minor advantages, but there are probably also disadvantages: this doesn't help you learn the different modes (minor, dorian, etc.). Instead, they might be hindered by your muscle memory.

So, for comping it can shine, but for normal music, probably a disadvantage. I certainly don't see any advantage that should make everybody switch.

Probably not much difference - learning the different keys is a easy to talk about task, but you will spend a lot more time repeatedly practicing all the other things. If you were to teach someone to a high level but only the key of C, and someone else to a similar high level but all keys, and the end only a few weeks longer would be spent for the person learning all keys - and that person gets a lot more versatility.

Isomorphic is more logical and so easier to explain, but you still should be teaching the circle of 5ths to students. Once someone understands the circle of 5ths the layout of the conventional keyboard makes logical sense as well (it won't be as intuitive but the logic makes sense).

On guitar in fourths tuning, you only need to learn each interval and chord shape once, compared to multiple permutations in standard tuning. Not sure how much difference this makes over the long run as another poster pointed out, but for me it made the process seem much less overwhelming and motivated me to start learning how to make my own chord voicings, which is something I wouldn't have done in standard tuning.