i hate keyboards

they remind me of piano lessons i hated when i was little. such a shame cause im good at it. i get a bit of "fuck" in my brain looking at them

Keyboards rock. Once you learn the 2212221 (WWSWWWS) sequence, the fingering and finger sweeps and where the C key is you can teach yourself. Practice every day and you see continual improvement. Within like 3-4 months you'll be playing 7th chords and getting the hang of working independently with left hand/right hand.

If you want to learn classical and want to perform in a concert hall or with an ensemble you'll need harsh education and lessons however.

What I do hate are mini keyboards. I keep hitting the keys in groups of two with my fat fingers. Stop buying mini keyboards for gods sake so they become less profitable and we can go back to sane, big keys.

Full size keyboards are a pain to transport though. I don't have a car and I don't want one. My 37 mini-key yamaha midi controller is super portable. I couldn't imagine even being able to take a 37 full-size key controller out to gigs as easily.

There's 2 kinds of keyboards.

 

I dislike musical keyboards I guess, less so than "guitars", but still.

Had an Analog Keys, first keyboard synth I owned, but it was collecting dust mostly. Must have been the clunky bigness of the device. I just don't feel playing keys on a board as a note input method. with each key, it's like, why the fuck is this quantized to an arbitrary fixed frequency? And the fact that there's black and white keys is shit, somehow the interface is biased towards C major? We're not in the 18th century anymore my friends.

 

Then there's computer keyboards. Love em. It's the best and most productive input method to a computer, period. Most music software sucks because it's too mouse-clickey, they should all be keyboard-primary.

Edited January 17, 2016 by Guest

this Mesh?

I really want to control a synth with a guitar, midi guitars are really not anywhere near for me yet.

I've been using a Push for a couple years now and am addicted to the malleable scaling structure and variety of input formats it has available at all times. If we want our hardware, software, and ultimately our sounds, to be customizable and fluid, the methods we use to interact with those things should be so too. Ableton's Push is one of the best for this. There are a few others that are in the same wheelhouse; Monome and Misa Digital NSC-32 are the first that come to mind, though I've never used them.

 

 

sent from a tippytappy flatpad

^ flatpads are certainly good for certain things

Unless you simply can't play a keyboard I don't get why anyone could possibly prefer a guitar-style interface--the chordal possibilities are so much more limited. The problems with keyboard instruments arise only when you want to deal with microtones. That's when you realise you're working with a fixed-pitch percussion instrument.

  On 1/17/2016 at 2:03 PM, waldszenen said:

Unless you simply can't play a keyboard I don't get why anyone could possibly prefer a guitar-style interface--the chordal possibilities are so much more limited.

Expression?

I'm getting better with keys, but it's not very fluent. I can percussion and guitar/bass the shit out of music. I wish I could just have a decent midi guitar setup and that the technology for that was better. I'd ditch all my keyboards and get modules if I could control all my synths and drum machines with midi guitar and a drum kit. But I like learning, playing keys has opened me up to exploring some different things, it's just not preferred.

 

A lot of the keyboard parts in songs that I have posted to my soundcloud from years back are all done live tracking and playing notes from my fucking laptop keyboard in multiple takes if it required more than one octave. I never had a midi keyboard for any of that stuff and would only pop in the midi to live's sequencer to program drums or the occasional detailed staccato lines. I liked the sound of playing a Rhodes from my keyboard, was kinda cool to play well on it lol.

 

BTW : I totally agree with Entorwellian, mini keys aren't the best, mostly due to my hand size and lack of proper piano playing knowledge. Not saying they have to go away, I just don't like them.

it is really down to being tormented by piano lessons. i want to play guitar but i suck at guitar

  On 1/17/2016 at 4:13 PM, Mesh Gear Fox said:

 

  On 1/17/2016 at 1:05 PM, Salem1976 said:

this Mesh?

yeah that's it. is there just one company with a patent on that style or are there are a few variants?

I've seen a few variants. I was a tester for an early model of something like this around 10 years ago but sadly it never went past the prototype stage. Pretty easy to learn though, surprisingly!

yeah that is certainly one of my hurdles when learning to play keyboard, especially after playing guitar for most of my life (even though guitar has its own idiosyncrasies). For the device pictured above, though, wouldn't that be worse than mini-keys in terms of accidentally hitting a wrong key/multiple keys?

 

plus, I suppose something good about a standard keyboard, is that it's somewhat easy to play without looking, once you know the layout. This could be emulated by perhaps having certain keys have a little home-key style 'bump' on them, but then again if you're playing weird 39-note scales or whatever, such a feature would probably get in the way..

Exactly audiobyl.

I can play keys ok, I can knock out a tune, write lines etc but I have no real chops whereas guitar I can flow and write quickly and come up with ideas and they stay in my brain easier. Plus the expression is a good side to it. To Express a synth patch with delicate velocity and pitch as you would do with a guitar would be stunning, it's just not as far along as i'd like it to be.

That's the most disappointing part of that technology (midi-guitar) is that it takes away a lot of the expressiveness inherent in the skills I've acquired making music in my life. I tried it once and had to deaden the strings with a sock on the neck and play the notes staccato then fix timing, fix wrong notes, toggle velocity and holds to the notes that need to be sustained. Kinda useless besides if you can't translate melodies into notes if you learned to play with tabs. But notation or the like isn't my issue, it's just incredibly tedious to write guitar parts into a midi scroll.

 

I greatly admire AFX for his ability to express so much through his machines. When I was younger I swore he was a fantastic drum-kit player because he can program beats that have the characteristics of a trained drummer, but he admittedly doesn't know how to play a drumset. Also the fact that he's stated that most of his synth lines and piano stuff is programmed and executed by midi is just fucking mind-blowing to me.

 

There is a lot to be said to learning new ways to express in music. The last 4 years or so of my life I have stepped to programming music and learned how to make it sing the way I can get my more comfortable output to do, if you catch my drift. It's just not 100% yet and part of that is my needing to adapt and part of that (probably a much smaller part) is the technology for a lot of that stuff is expensive and somewhat limited in some instances.

you either got it or you dont imo. aphex is an old school midi man. he knows the tricks to make it feel human

True^