Making and selling a jammer conversion kit
Hi fellow keyboard improvement keeners,
Since the Thummer is M.I.A. I'm now making generic keyboard modification key caps made. You can then build your own generic keyboard, and set it to either be Janko (chromatone) style, jammer (thummer a.k.a. Wicki/Hayden) or a C-Thru unit, albeit it will only have 4 active key-rows and 2 duplicate key-rows. If you select the Janko layout effectively 6 rows will be active rows - you'll have a full keyboard. It won't be as good as a Thummer, but it will be a step on the way.
You can make the unit look like this one:
it will probably be about 4 cm longer and 2 cm lower in height, and have better action and feel, The changes will be reversible (just put the old keys back on), so that you can restore your standard keyboard. I've also got provisional agreement from M-Audio for them to sell us their warranty returns.
The keys will allow us to create flexible generic keyboards of 4 rows (with 2 optional dummy rows) high by n rows wide - up to 88 (using 2 m-audio es88s) , 66, 69 or 49 etc, and you can put on the key-cap of your choice.
Price? I'm guessing that creating the molds and creating a couple of dozen kits will be within my budget and what I'm willing to gamble away. I'll sell them to cover costs - $200?
One thing for you to do - I'd dearly like to have a reduced-size
keyboard (ideally a Usb-powered controller like the m-audios) to work
with - see my jammer improvement notes. If you could find one, it would be great.
Also dearly hoped for is switches that could be used to sense velocity, that is, they would trigger twice when depressing then we could build 6-row pianoforte-plus keyboards of the perfect dimensions.
Sincerely,
Ken @ MusicScienceGuy.vox.com
BTW color is turning out to be very useful - I see a note on the score and the position gives it a color, and the color gives me my fingering).
Comments
I'd like to make one but not an electronic thing. Besides no knowing the first thing about electronics, I play in places that doesn't have power... and I don't like the sound of sound coming out of speakers.
The version I'm planing on making is a variant of the Array Mbira.
Ken.