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I hadn't seen this before. Have you?

ClavAnother wrote:I hadn't seen this before. Have you?

No, I hadn't seen it. Pretty crazy!

I'd like to hear a skilled person play it, rather than hear someone bla about how this instrument will enhance your awareness of hyper-cognoscentience inherent in the expanded viewpoint of the worldhive community on the quest of covfefeal consciousness.

For instance, I wanna see someone play it like a steel pedal guitar, or at least bend a few notes like Jan or Duke.

I know. That demonstration just proves that you can move the slider all the way through the range...but it doesn't prove that you should.

It's left to the imagination of creative people to explore.

I'm personally not really into microtonal music, although I often spend up to 8 hours at a time listening to tabla solos (indian classical music), with or without sitar.

I don't even know what the use is for that piano, but I do like it that somebody made one.

I wonder what would happen to it's integrity if you did a blanket detune to Eb so you can jam with SRV wannabes.

Practically speaking, from what I can tell, most people pointing to "microtones" in traditional music in my opinion often are really are pointing to either tuning variations, usually forms of just intonation, or what I would call "bendies" (like, say, blue notes in jazz / blues, or doing half note type bends on a geetar or synth, or Arabic type half notes) where one flattens / sharpens notes for effect.

The math of just intonation (whole integer ratios as much as possible) does mean that there actually are many possible "correct frequencies" for each note, depending on how you construct your scale. So to truly be in tune with some ragas, something like this is probably welcome. However, as far as I know, in most Indian classical music there are only a limited amount of notes per raga (usually seven). So it's not like we're going quarter tone crazy here, which is why I dislike the "microtonal" term for this.

I've played a bit with just intonation for synths, and while it is a bit more sonorous it has severe downsides -- you really can only play in one key without it sounding awful. You also practically speaking can only set one "whole integer ratio" per note and when playing a passage, that ratio all of a sudden may not be "the right one", so you also kind of have to restrict *what* to play. The true upside of equal temperament is it sounds "closeish enough" in tune, yet allows easy key modulation on fixed frequency instruments. This in practice is huge, and is why it's kind of "taken over the world".

Indian classical music, of course, in general sticks with one key / one raga with very specific rules for each one (as I understand it), so I do think this type of instrument does fit Indian classical music to a tee. It's no surprise that the home page of the fluid piano is focused on the raga.

It sounds like something Loreena McKennitt could use... she has microtonal instruments in her music sometimes. Well, if she's not retired yet, she hasn't released anything in 7 years.

ClavAnother wrote:you can move the slider all the way through the range...but it doesn't prove that you should.

I think by all means you should. I for one am tired of guitarists getting all teh glory just because they can bend them strings.

And yeah, hats off to the inventor for a good idea. If nothing else, it might make it easier to touch up your tuning between visits from the tuner dude.

Interesting, would also like to hear it played by someone who really knows what they're doing.

Now that I think about it, why isn't there a steel pedal piano?

Short answer: because your feet would probably need elephant strength to run it.

But it might make an interesting project for a pianompler. How would it be arranged? Twelve rocker pedals, one each to bend all the octaves of each tone up or down? Maybe better to have twenty four pedals? I just happen to have a spare Hammond pedal clavier in teh basement...

As a side tangent to that, one of the reasons why we Need Moar PolyAT Keyboards is that per-note bendies is a perfect application for that.

soundwave106 wrote:As a side tangent to that, one of the reasons why we Need Moar PolyAT Keyboards is that per-note bendies is a perfect application for that.

Agreed. I loved my old A-80 even if I hurt my hand once using that poly AF....

christianrock wrote: I loved my old A-80 even if I hurt my hand once using that poly AF....

Yeah u hafta modify those.

soundwave106 wrote:As a side tangent to that, one of the reasons why we Need Moar PolyAT Keyboards is that per-note bendies is a perfect application for that.

@ teh Linn booth today Roger had a Chapman stick guy demoing the Linnstrument. Its practically the same instrument if you think about it. He could rip on that thing i tell ya.

Plink Floyd wrote:@ teh Linn booth today Roger had a Chapman stick guy demoing the Linnstrument. Its practically the same instrument if you think about it. He could rip on that thing i tell ya.

Linnstruments are cool; unfortunately in order to "rip" on it, you do have to spend some time to learn how to play it. I think guitarists actually have an advantage with the Linn compared to keyboardists, as the fingering is more on those lines, and guitarists are already more used to thinking notes in multiple dimensions.

Despite me not being able to play notes on it too well, it's cool to set the Linn to CC and control in XYZ dimensions.