Video Explanation of my redesigned 3D Printable Isomorphic Keyboard Piano Overlay

[John Moriarty]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tMtKyYEbaM

In the video I talk a little about the new shapes of the keys and the color scheme. Please ask any questions you might have!

Shameless plug: If you'd like to support projects like this, consider pledging $1/video on my Patreon! I'd like to eventually be able to support myself doing projects like these (and making videos about them) full time, and every little bit gives me a little more freedom to devote more time to them now. Patreon.com/johnmoriarty

[Ben Bradley]

This is really neat - I watched and I really appreciate the time and
thought you put into this design!

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[peter moomaw]

Cool overlay. This layout is basically the same one as Bosanquet came up with in the 1800s, with hexagonal shaped keys instead of rectangular shaped ones. Another nice modification of this layout is the seven rank version described by Wilson (http://www.anaphoria.com/xen1.pdf). I have played on both these layouts on a large touchscreen, and for meantone tunings (which 12edo is a specific example of) the seven rank one seems nicer, because the keys are wider, and the diatonic scale lies on adjacent keys. I wounder how hard it design an overlay for the seven column version?

[John Moriarty]

Thanks for your thoughts! The bosanquet layout you linked has adjacent major seconds, minor seconds, and augmented unisons, which is very slightly different from this layout, which has adjacent minor seconds, augmented unisons, and diminished seconds (directly above or below to the enharmonic equivalent). It would be a very small change, though, from my current layout to the bosanquet.

The bosanquet layout as shown in your link places sharps and flats directly above and below their natural notes, so you do have to change it in one of two ways (that I know of) to make it work on an overlay. (Notes that have different pitches can't be at the same horizontal position on an overlay because they'd be over the same note on the piano underneath.)

You could rotate the layout so that the sharps and flats are to the right and left of their respective naturals (and so would line up with the correct underlying piano key), but then you end up with the octaves drifting towards or away from the player, depending on which direction you go, which is no good. The other option is to skew the layout, which would do the trick, and should leave you with parallelogram-shaped keys with the same adjacent intervals. (I'm not sure if you would have to anything more since I'm not familiar with the underlying maths involved, but it would probably be trivial to figure out.)

So to directly respond to your wondering, it shouldn't be hard at all, given a little thought. I'm actually ion the middle of writing a program that will auto-generate the files for Overlays like this one given user-specified parameters and, once It's finished, I'll see if I can't generate a Bosanquet one =) (The main reason I'm doing that though is for different tunings, especially those with cardinalities close to 12 like 11 and 13, since they'll fit nicely under the fingers =)

Cheers,

John

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