If you are looking for a traditional keyboard check out the McCarthy Illuminating Piano.
The biggest difference in our design is the exclusion of all controls, buttons knobs and so on which means that even though the Keys device is about the same size as some of these other portable devices, the keys themselves are nearly the same size and layout ratios as traditional. In other words, full size keys not mini size which is hard to tell in the pictures. This feature, of both our personal opinions and the feedback of professionals we gave Keys to, is significantly more important than any other in a truly useful as well as portable keyboard.
The fact that all controls are removed and the design is purely keys also allows for the modular nature, and the ability to connect Keys together in various ways as well as other modules.
Each sensor sends on a separate control channel, and when linking multiple keys devices together, the control channels are transposed so adjacent keys sensors each send CC on their own channel (so each sensor is mappable, and in the same fashion for a given configuration of devices)
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/artiphon/introducing-th...
I have a few things I'm pretty good at, and I'll pick up & try anything, because it's fun. Most of the music I make is improvised. And I've been picking up & trying any instrument I run across for decades now, so I have snippets of experience in lots of things now.
My wife studied classical piano from an early age, and can sit down and sight-read stuff I haven't got a chance at playing on any instrument. But she never improvises, never tries out other instruments, and thus can't really do the same thing (pick up anything and make music on it).
We both have a (possibly-inborn) talent for music, but we've taken quite different paths, and those years spent quite differently really show, now.
You can make surprisingly complicated music just clapping.
I think the crucial difference is just in how we grew up thinking about music.
My wife grew up in a culture where everything was publicly judged, students and performers were rated & ranked, etc.. If you did something and you didn't do it well, you'd better do it in secret.
I wasn't free from those feelings, but it wasn't as emphasized; and as I grew up, I eventually had a good base of things I was known to be good at... which in a way freed me to do other things badly.
And the funny thing about trying lots of new things (and doing them badly) is that practice makes you better rapid competence in new things -- this works in music, but also in anything else in life.
This is what I most want to emphasize whenever anyone talks about people with natural talent for music, for example (which can seem particularly magic to people with little experience of their own).
There are probably some inborn elements involved -- how well your ears work, etc. -- but so much really is learned, and once you're hooked, the amount of "practice" in music and thinking about sound becomes huge.
I'm not a pro performer, and not likely to become one; but it's something I love, so I probably spent 6+ hours a day doing something with music interleaved into it. Not sitting down with an instrument, most of the time, but washing the dishes. Driving the car. Playing with my kids. Walking the dog.
So I can imagine how pervasive it could be for someone really focusing their life on music.
Natural talent, sure; but don't forget the hundreds of thousands of hours some people spend training their minds to the patterns of music.
other than that, the proximity sensor looks awesome, and the price point is pretty incredible! not to mention the light-up stuff for people learning.
That's where the design initially came from, but I knew one of the most important things is that the keys had to be full size. Mini key designs always left something to be desired, and I would just use my laptop keyboard instead - which seemed to be more effective and in the long run more convenient too - since these controllers were really cumbersome.
So when I first gave the design to musicians I was scared that they would immediately reject it. The Keys were full size, but the interface was different than what they were used to. But they made zero mention of it, and you can see in later half the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guKRk3WPc40
I know no feedback sounds like bad feedback, but in this case it was really positive. These guys would immediately start wailing on keys like it was natural. These are guys that do this for a living, and I didn't hear one comment about the difference in the keys from a traditional piano.
So take it for what it is - We weren't ignorant of the fact that Keys isn't a traditional design, but all the same - this approach also makes it significantly more portable - and the great thing about AMON (the networking stuff) is we could always make a traditional version and it would still work and link with the non-traditional layout.
I'm not primarily a keyboardist, but I use them; in this case it would surely be tricky to play anything that uses the black keys much; your hands have patterns memorized that (I'd imagine) would be tough to adapt to having the black keys on a separate row.
But because it's MIDI, it really does depend on what you're building, and it might not matter. Recording simple snatches of melody would be fine if you keep away from chromatic lines -- e.g., if you want to add a line that's in C minor, just record it in A minor (all white keys except maybe the G#), then transpose it in a few seconds.
You wouldn't play the Flight of the Bumblebee on it, though.
I'll be honest, I'm not a keyboard player. I designed this to be truly mobile and portable without making compromises on the key size, which my theory is that having a full scale keyboard is more important than the traditional design of the keys. The former makes the device useful, and the later makes it familiar but also prevents it from being very portable without shrinking the keys or otherwise compromising on other dimensions.
I've seen people shred on Keys, it's pretty awesome to see, since I can barely play Yankee Doodle - but I'm getting a lot better!
For playing piano, and other player-volume controlled instruments, you want velocity sensitivity.
For organ, or maybe early electric "pianos" you don't...you want an expression/volume pedal. This is one reason a virtuoso organ player can do things a piano player couldn't - they can use all kinds of "wrong" reachs and finger movements that enable them to play things that they couldn't otherwise.
This was a very critical aspect of the design and actually led to the implementation of the proximity sensors. We had to remove all controls to get this size but still be about the width of a 13" laptop - and the need for certain controls like octave transposition was the impetus for looking into other control methodologies like proximity based gestures.
