Exploring, building and playing isomorphic keyboards.
Our RR Janko Slim keys are already a success story, we've been selling DIY kits to many countries around the world and a community of Janko players is beginning to grow. And the most important thing: The keys are such a joy to play, I simply love how ergonomic they are and isomorphism is really rewarding - whatever you practice in one key, can immediately be applied to all other keys as well! But…
One day my friend Panos told me "Hey, why don't you apply at the Superbooth in Berlin to show your Janko keys. They support all kind of small start-ups for musical innovations". I was pretty excited about the idea, I've never been an exhibitor before and the Janko project was still so young. I wrote an email to the organizer and not much later got an answer: They thanked me for the application,…
In the meantime, I've recorded plenty of videos on the RR Janko Keyboard, had many interesting conversations about it and several people bought their own one. There was one issue, though, that many people expressed in their comments and I agreed with them: The classical layout in combination with the slim Janko keys looks pretty messy. I had experimented with different color layouts already…
The Jankó is here! While Peter and I are preparing for making this Jankó version available for many people, I've used the time to start sharing the knowledge about the Jankó piano, why its layout is the way it is, what isomorphism is, how to play chord shapes and scale fingerings, and why it might actually be a pretty nice approach to piano for guitar players. Check out the LEARN section on this…
Since my first meeting with Jankó piano maker Peter Reinert, I have kept the contact with him and had a lively exchange. My girlfriend and I visited him from time to time and we've become good friends by now. I was presenting him my slim-key Jankó design and described the steps to build it. The acoustic Jankó piano that he built in the past is a masterpiece, but it's an incredibly large effort to…
Discovering that the slim-key version of the Jankó was working so well really felt like a breakthrough! However, the previous version still had two issues: The highest row had too much resistance and one had the feeling that when pressing a key, the force was directed into the wrong direction. The keys of the lowest row were too long, exceeding the original keys by too much, they had too low…
The building process of the previous Jankó was a lot of fun and I was very happy with the result. Nevertheless, after playing it for a while, I noticed several problems with the key layout: For certain larger chords, some of the fingers needed to be stretched or bent quite uncomfortably leading to unergonomic hand positions. For example, as shown in the picture, for a major seventh chord with the…
The first Jankó keyboard we built only had four rows with 2x2cm keys. After a while I realized that four rows with so small keys was simply not enough. My thumb was constantly missing an extra row. So our next project should be a Jankó overlay with the original six rows. Since the rows are build in steps, six rows would mean quite a lot of height difference between the first and the last row. In…
Having a large Jankó midi keyboard at home is one thing. But I got so inspired by the intuitive feeling of the isomorphic layout that I also wanted to play one when being on the road. I had some good experience with the Xkey keyboard by CME. It is light, flat, and playing on it reminds me a bit of writing on a computer keyboard (even though that isn't what you would expect from a good piano…
When realizing that the Lumatone was not what I was looking for I started searching for alternatives. The first thing that came to mind was my meeting with Peter Reinert half a year earlier. I wrote him an E-Mail asking whether he could build a midi Jankó keyboard for me (I remembered from our conversation that he once built something like that). He replied in a very kind mail that, in principal,…
After my first meeting with a Jankó piano, I was fully convinced that I wanted to own and play one. But buying an isomorphic piano is almost impossible. There were basically only three options. The first one would be spending around 20.000€ for a custom made acoustic Jankó piano. The second one was an offer on Facebook by somebody selling one of the few produced Daskin keyboards. I tried to buy it…
My background is playing jazz drums and bass guitar. Later I also taught myself to play the guitar. Only many years later, inspired by bands like GoGo Penguin, I started learning the piano. From the guitar I was used to be able to simply move chord shapes to the left or right to transpose them and thus, playing the same song in different keys was not really a problem. On the piano it turned out to…