4 posts tagged “jammer”

Hi loyal readers. You sure are a varied lot.  See: my site monitor  .

While work goes forth on the Generalized Keyboard conversion kit, I'm refining the design of the jammer.
I had to take it apart to analyse the keys and to show to plastic makers. Now I'm improving it as I put it back together.

The main change is invisible: I've tuning the keys to the same, much lighter weight, so that I have more hope of learning to play it well. when first constructed I was happy to have a working instrument with all keys that worked and had pianoforte. Now, as I learn the details of construction and the mechanics of playing, I'm getting more fussy. When I measured the pressures required, I found they were way out of spec. The good part is that, now that I've found this out, others are saved the work.

But enough of technicalities. On to the important things: gadgetry.
Can you guess what I'm going to do with these items?

The first correct answer gets a free jammer conversion kit (when finally I start making them).

Ken.

Update: Here's what it looks like after the 1st assembly, but before refinement and styling.

What if there was a musical instrument that was easier to learn, faster to play and best of all, provided a special insight into how music comes into being?

Herein I present the “jammer”, an innovative musical keyboard design, and why it’s so cool.

First, let’s design a music keyboard from scratch, as if you’d never seen one before.
There are 12 notes in an octave,
     spaced apart by a semitone. 
     Two semitones steps make a wholetone.

Step 1: Lay out the keys in one row all equally spaced by semi-tones, like this, and you have the layout of a harp's strings.

But unlike in a harp, we don't have to be linear, and we don't have to base our design on a early harp-like instrument that only had the C-major scale's notes.
Next: It makes sense to stagger notes so they alternate: 

And slam them closer together:

 

 

So far so simple. If you play all in sequence all 12 notes you get a chromatic scale, presumably so named because it has every color of note on the scale. Most musical scales are whole tone based, with the type defined, largely, by the notes they skip, and when they sneak in a semitone jump. With this layout, a major scale goes as shown right:

If you add a third row on top, then you can play any scale, in any key using the same pattern.

Playing major scale on jammer

You have much less to learn – 1/12th (!) as many patterns as on a standard piano keyboard.

This is the Janko pattern and is over a century old.

It's also a trifle bulky, as you can see if you click the above link.

The technical term, used (I suspect) to either scare off non-geeks or to sound intellectual is isomorphism. I prefer the term consistent-interval, or simply consistent. (Personally I bet we'll one day hear the term in a science fiction show: "he's gone isomorphic, Jim")

Compare to learning the piano as show here:

It was first designed without black notes,
and its totally designed around the C-major scale. 

Other scales are fiendishly hard to play.

It's rumored that the Janko pattern was scuttled, despite being favored by noted pianists, by piano teachers. Bad people!

So, there you have part one - make a keyboard consistent, and it's (a lot!) easier to learn.
Part two is here.

That’s easier to learn – what about easier to play?

While the Janko pattern is cool, it flopped a century ago, and perhaps not all the blame lies in greedy piano teachers. After all, pianos are hard to lug around, and an reduction from learning 12 (!) fingering patterns to just 1 streamlines only one part of the playing experience. After all, the simple alternative is to just learn one pattern as was often done.

Can we do better? Can we take advantage of the fact that some notes are physically adjacent? Normally on a piano you’d seldom play adjacent (Black and white) notes.

Lets look at the important notes in the scale. In all scales there’s a special note, the Root, it’s odd twin the Octave,  shown in green on the right.

They have special partners the 5^th and the 4^th, also know as the dominant and  sub-dominant. 

Practically every musically useful chord pairs a root or the octave with the 4^th or 5^th. With a linear layout, the useful notes are spread out and you have to bop around a lot: great, big hand motions are needed, and the piano keys are big and heavy because the thumb also has to be able to play them.
And ... you can’t wear a piano, or even carry it to your next gig.

If we slide the notes in the second row over a bit, the 4^th and the 5^th can be put right above the root.

Consequences both simple and a bit bizarre:

• On the third row above, the octave naturally appears above the root, between the 4^th and 5^th. All the important notes touch.
• The design is brilliant. My thanks go to the inventor, Brian Hayden.
• We can play the commonest useful pairs of notes with one finger.
• Thus suddenly almost every chord needs one less finger - often two!
  

  Less 'Spacey' notes
• Add a few more rows and the hand movement needed to switch octaves drops from feet to mere inches.
• Instead of moving the hand a lot left and right, just the fingers have to move a bit up and down
  
• Bizarre side effect #1; it gets harder to play wrong notes, as the dissonant pairs have been pushed apart. 
• Bizarre side effect #2; you can play new patterns with your hand turned sideways.
• Since the keys are closer, one can play more exotic and interesting chords with one hand - you can jam!

And there's more:

• The thumb is free to do cool things to the sound, as is shown at thummer.com.
• The human brain is wired to think in this pattern, so players understand it deeply.
  

So there you have it – here’s an instrument that you can play in any key, significantly faster, and as I show in the next segment, also allows you to jam, improvise, arrange, understand and therefore teach music far faster.

So how do you get one? You either join the ThumClub, and lobby for a Thummer(tm) (joining does not seem to get you more than 2 emails a year, for those spam-shy), or build one. I, naturally, recommend both.

* We'll deal with thirds later; they are a fully a topic on their own.

* Also note the this idea is not unique, a guitar's strings mostly go up in fourths (4th, 4th, 4th, 3rd & 4th to be precise), and some guitarists tune all their strings up in perfect fourths, violins strings are always tuned up in perfect 5ths. Finally, European accordions (concertinas) have this precise layout, known formally as Wicki-Hayden.

Downside:

Thus far, I don't know of much in the way of problems with this system, except that its a touch more complex (at first) than the Janko system. Even playing a chromatic scale (ascending semi-tones) is easier than on a piano.

Gavin Healy, one of the world's first jammer players, wrote:

"What I found amazing is that the Thummer taught me patterns of intervals like this one: whole-tone, whole-tone, semi-tone; whole-tone, whole-tone, whole-tone, semi-tone – which defines the major scale. This to me was like a revelation; I could simply remember this pattern and automatically transfer it to my instrument of choice. I felt like this was a hidden secret of music theory. Instead of learning all these different fingerings for scales, chords, progressions etc on the piano or whatever instrument when I was a kid, I could have been taught the geometry of music which actually makes more sense." 

How to make a “ZipEx” style jammer*

Riddle: How do you make a 4-row hexagonal-key instrument from a 2-row piano-key one? 
Answer: you fold it over and replace the keys!

Background:

Update: I've since made a second generation version, the ZipEx Mark II, the basics are still the same. This rebuild-from-the-PC-board-up way was much harder but resulted in a smaller, wearable version. The Mark II is heavier, but much easier to build. Ken.

A typical electronic keyboard has 2 parts, one is the music control thingy, I’ll call it the controller, and the second the key holder assembly itself.

I have examined just 2 keyboards, A Yamaha DjX, and a Technics P50, but I suspect most are pretty similar.

The key board electronics is on two loooong printed

circuit boards (PCB) clamped into the key assembly. The two boards are connected to each other by a single 6-inch, 12-lead wire, and one of the boards in turn connected by a 10 inch or so, 6-lead connector to the controller.

Each long PCB has clamped onto it a bunch of rubber buttons which make a little dome about 2-3 mm over the PCB. These buttons are depressed when the plastic keys of the keyboard assembly are depressed (I'm not sure what makes them happy).

The underside of the little dome buttons, the part clamped to the PCB, has a little bit of conductive black graphite paint on it, and when it hits the PCB, it closes a circuit, and the circuit generates a signal that the controller interprets.

 

On the Technics keyboard, each key has two buttons it depresses, presumably at slightly different times to denote a key's velocity.  The Yamaha has a double contact set within each button and the contacts are of slightly different length, thus also hinting at the key's velocity. The important thing here is that you don't need to know further detail on how it works, or electronics.

In my design, I used just the pc boards and the rubber buttons, and rebuilt the key holder assembly.

List of materials

• A keyboard to cannibalize - I used a second-hand Yamaha DjX,  $60
  
• Clear plastic about 3 mm thick for the base – I used a piece from a vinyl window. One should be able to get this from a glass window shop.
• 70 plastic or metal posts – allow extra 10 for wastage - a set of 19 mm nylon spacers for PCB boards worked well here. 
• Material to make 70 plastic or wooden keys. I used Douglas fir for Practice, and settled on Maple rather than Oak
• 35 springs – I cut them in half, as they were expensive, @ 80 cents each. Drop a comment if you need a supplier.  
• 70 key caps.  – made from thick plastic sheets – I have some extras I can send to you. 
• The keys caps were attached to the key-tops with double–sided tape.
• Lots of bolts to attach the posts to the base and to cap the posts
• A tap to thread the posts so the bolts could screw onto them.

Tools

• Drill press with depth control
• 

  ZipEx Half Built
  Drill bits in 1/64" gradations
• Sander is handy
• A protractor, ruler and a compass.
• Several colors of fine-tipped Felt pens to mark up the plastic
• Table Saw to make the keys
  

Software

• Needed is some way to remap the keys to different notes. I used MAX/MAP, an expensive program @ $500 (I have other uses in mind for it, so felt it's price justified). One might be able to use Java, or in a pinch, I can compile my Max version and send you a runtime.  

Layout – the pattern is drawn on the [plastic with fine-tipped felt marker pens.
The spacing between key is determined by the average inter-key spacing of the switches on the PCB, and simple geometry.

The key spacing on the PCB is slightly irregular, due to the irregular placement of black keys. This made things a bit complicated, as the buttons didn't line up with the jammer keys.

.

There are two ways discovered thus far to mount the circular or hexagonal keys for the jammer:

• mount them on posts - this is fairly fiddly, as 60 sets of holes have to be drilled, and each set is of 8 or so individual holes in addition to making the keys themselves. There were also problems removing friction.
  
• Mount them on little arms - I have not tried this way, but will use this for my mark II version. 
  

That's all for now - if you want to build your own, post a comment, and I will add gladly add detail.

Update: Johannes Drinda asked how I made the keys.

====================================

Here's the end product. In addition, the pitch-bend wheel was mounted in the corner and a brass rod attached. 

The black keys at the sides (one PCB was 6 notes longer than the other, so there was overhang) are octave-shifting function keys, used to make it pretend to have more rows and keys. In effect I have a 96-key keyboard that pretends, when needed, to be two keyboards, one for each hand. The blue-black keys in the center divide the two sides of the instrument, and are dynamically assigned to whichever hand is playing near them.

With the special function keys, it's surprisingly easy to play in pretty much any key.

The case was easily made out of brass angle-iron and the leather strap bought at a guitar shop.