Making a virtue out of necessity
When one is faced with limited options, sometimes the limitations spur innovation.
In other words, any idiot can make perfection with perfect tools and gadgets, but it takes a real idiot to fake success successfully.
With the M-audio unit, the PC board does not split evenly in half, instead there's a row of 49 and a row of 39 keys.
This means there are 39 keys that can be paired up, with 10 left over.
39 keys is pretty good, - that gives almost 20 keys for each side (actually more, if one is clever with programming). the extra 10 can be either used as more notes, or as I've elected, special keys.
The layout I've elected is to make each side into separate logical keyboards, one for each hand. the default setting is for them to work together as a single piano keyboard, with the right hand C being C3 - "middle C" and the left-hand main-row C being C1. The rows above are of course the octave above. (The top row and bottom row are, alas, the same note as the upper middle and lower middle row - I just put in an extra row of keys onto the M-Audio's physical keys, I figured they'd still be handy for keying)
This only gives a measly 4 or 5 octaves - not too impressive when you started off with 7 and a bit. Not too much compensation that they are great octaves, really easy to play.
However, there are those extra control keys at the side
- can we use them to improve the keyboard?
One possible set-up is as illustrated.
- access to the rest of the octaves - all of them
- an easy way to do a halftone modulation
- a way to do a "one-line" shift
- a simple way to switch to any key.
- an easy way to reset.
Here's how the keyboard divides into a left and right logical (virtural) keyboard, each of which can be independently assigned a instrument, and/or a desired octave range. I'm hoping it will make contrapuntal motion in the same octave really easy.
