Dark Keys
Maybell Hughs
To start the mission, the player must find any one of three bank deposit box keys scattered around the Mountain Town region. Each key unlocks a safety deposit box in the Milton Credit Union vault. Finding all three keys and opening all three safety deposit boxes will complete the mission.
Did you have the software up to date? When you open up the Actions tab in iCUE, click the "+" button, select the DPI up and down buttons, set them to disable. You might have to do this twice (one layer of action per button). Try restarting your PC as well.
Remapping has stopped working on my K100 and Dark Core RGB Pro SE as well. I have remapped some keys and mouse buttons correctly under both Actions and Hardware Actions, but nothing happens when I press them. If I quit iCUE, the Hardware Actions start working. If I relaunch iCUE, the Actions stop working again.
Most ordinary (cheap or expensive) keyboards have a little bump on the home keys. A lot of keys can be found by dead reckoning from there, and the function keys, Esc, etc. on a full sized keyboard can be found based on groupings (you examples of F1 and F5 are the leftmost in the left 2 groups of 4 F-keys, * and - on the number pad are easier than on the number row). Laptops can be harder, as can compact keyboards
In some darkened (laser) labs I've been known to arrange the keyboard and monitor so that the monitor illuminates the keys. However this isn't very ergonomic, and is only suitable where use is going to be intermittent.
When I did not have a lit keyboard and I was playing 3D video games, I used a normal desk lamp with one of the weakest light bulbs available, positioned to light mostly away from the keyboard and screen - it gave me enough light to see the keyboard, and it was low enough to allow me to play the dark areas of the game.
Glow-in-the-dark paint, such as this, just above or below a key (or if the keys are indented, in the grooves of the letters) might help orient you. Of course the paint needs to be "charged" in light before use, but some paints stay visible for many hours.
It all depends on how your monitor and keyboard are positioned. You can try adjusting the tilt of the keyboard or whatever for the mirror to work if you feel comfortable with the tilt, or just pick the mirror up, adjust it until the angle and height work, and then put it on top of a box or some other platform with the right height.
Wouldn't just a piece of tape (e.g. duct tape) work to make a key feel different enough than its neighbours? On most keyboards, the F and J keys have a small underline/bump at the bottom and my index fingers can find those easily.
I hardly ever look at my keyboard, not even those special keys, as I use them often enough. It does help to have the hands in touch-typing standard position, (I have learned to have my index fingers to the left and right of the G and H,) and always use the same keyboard.
I was reading this book and on the "Circle of Fifths" chapter, it claims that keys with sharp key signatures (C, G, D, ...) are "often thought by musicians" to be "bright" sounding, whereas those with flat key signatures (F, Bb, Eb, ...) sound "darker".
In our equal temperament scales (which I believe to be the ones the author is talking about here), how would this make any sense? Is C not an arbitrarily chosen frequency? If C is an arbitrary point in the frequency space, and equal temperament scales have the same distance between each semitone, it makes no sense for different keys to have different colors based on their relationship to C.
Whether this has any relevance to pop music is doubtful. Pop doesn't tend to modulate much at all, except for the last repetition of the chorus... almost always up, although if you raise the entire key by a half-tone it may well be notated with five flats instead of the seven sharps you'd need.
Of course this too can't be more than a rule of thumb, but there does appear to be some trend that brighter instruments are more comfortable with sharper keys. This may also contribute to a perception that compositions / passages in flat keys sound darker: because they feature dark instruments more prominently!
It may have made a subtle difference in the days before ET but since then, F# = Gb, for example, so how can two identical sounding keys portray different emotions, or indeed sound different? I'm guessing that before ET F# and Gb did sound slightly different, and possibly playing them back to back could give a perception of 'bright and dark'.
Having said that, some people have very heightened senses, and certain keys/tunings, or in particular, chords, will evoke another sense for them. As in - a dominant 7th makes them think 'green', or even 'vanilla flavoured', so 'bright and dark' fits in well with that concept. But certainly not as a general rule. The 'bright/dark' is another theory that isn't a rule or law. Opinion, not fact.
We might not only be talking about an equal temperament context after all; This collective "musicians experience" might include wisdom passed down from the pre-equal temperament era. Speculating for a moment, it might even be that pre-equal temperament tunings influenced the repertoire written during those times, with the result that "darker-sounding" pieces were written in what were then darker-sounding keys; those keys are not darker-sounding now (in equal temperament), but the correlation might remain...
Some musicians may have a sense of "relative key", recognising C major/A minor as a 'home' key and hearing other keys as relative to that. (I'm pretty sure I don't hear this way, but then I don't have perfect pitch either, and many musicians do). Even if this were the case though, you'd imagine that hearing C as a 'home' key would be somewhat arbitrary (though it could make sense for pianists).
On some instruments, even those that are nominally tuned in equal temperament, there are real reasons why different keys might sound different : the pitches of open strings; the resonances of the instrument; imperfect tempering, and so on. On guitar, for example, the sharp keys G, D, A, and E are commonly used. However, that is an accident of the tuning of the instrument.
However with some instruments and vocal music, one cannot assume perfect twelve-tone pitch. Nevertheless I highly doubt, that a listener could tell apart F major (one "flat") from E# major ("sharp" scale).
I think keys (notes) in isolation don't matter. Intervals do. If your song is played on mostly black keys with occasional whites (where needed), and your friend's song is played on mostly white keys with occasional blacks, the two can express the same mood. Absolute pitch does not affect the type of emotions invoked, the sequence of tones and semi-tones (intervals) does. I think that is what a raga in Indian classical music is about. That is what a scale in western music is also about. Given that a raga also has a grammar (of allowed and forbidden sequences of notes) to follow, it is more sure to invoke a particular mood. A western composition would achieve this effect through the 'art'of the composer. Despite the association (or affinity) of major scales with bright and minor scales with sombre moods, a composer can reverse this effect through his 'art'.
In my education, the circle of fifths/fourths works clockwise adding sharps and goes a full 360 degrees adding sharps all the way around until you arrive back at the beginning. The same holds true moving in a counterclockwise direction, but adding flats instead of sharps. That means a sharp key is also interpreted in theory as a flat key, and a flat key may be interpreted as a sharp key. So for me, I find such a statement to be unnecessarily confusing. I just accept that each key has it's own characteristics, which I need to know, and I try to avoid such generalizations as bright and dark according to sharp or flat since each individual key can theoretically be classified sharp or flat.
As a wind band and sometimes orchestral composer and arranger, there are a few practical things to think about that are corollary to the bright/dark debate. The key itself is of little consequence due to equal and just temperament, but the physics of wind and string instruments do make subtle differences.
In a group setting, unfretted strings (in tune) will sound brighter than the same notes stopped with a finger due to the micro-tuning of each individual. The wider pitch band created by stopping sounds darker than a true unison. Some orchestras (I know Boston SO used to do this) purposefully tune their sections slightly out of tune (+/- 1 cent) to mitigate the difference between open and stopped strings.
It's been my observation that the "mood" in music can indeed be conveyed by whether it is in a flat or sharp key. Remember, this is a very subjective matter, and others' perceptions may differ. That being said...
I often wonder if the causal effect is reversed; i.e. an abundance of "bright"-sounding or "dark"-sounding songs have been written before the tonality of the song was decided. It's more as if the mood was established in the lyrics and melody before the composer put them to music. Just an alternate "devil's advocate" theory...
I have perfect pitch, so often I find myself hearing a song for the first time and already knowing what key in which it's played. This also has the side effect of me trying to determine the mood the composer was in when he/she wrote the song--i.e. "this is a 'happy' song so I'll write it in D major" or "this is a really sad song so it'll be in F minor", etc.
Often, musicians and audiences will notice that modulations in the sharp direction (adding sharps = raising notes) often feel as though the key has been "lifted", as some notes are higher. In pop songs that modulate up a half-step (or even a whole step), often the same brightness effect is undeniable. If keys get too sharp, they may be perceived as flat, due to enharmonic properties.
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