Greater Vancouver Alternative Musical Instrument Group forming

From Ken Rushton:

Want an advantage over other musicians and to look really cool?

I’m starting an Alternate Musical Instrument S.I.G. in the Greater Vancouver area. It’s for those who want to gain a musical edge. Do you:
– really, hugely want to learn to play an instrument, but don’t because the instrument is arcane or everyone else is musicians that started years ago
– are non-keyboard musicians: especially guitar players and sax players that want to play a keyboard but don’t because the keyboard is so bloody confusing
– are mediocre keyboardists that want a killer advantage: an instrument that is much faster to play and has many more musical possibilities than the traditional instrument
– are composers that want composition-boosting (instead of confusing) instruments

This is a great time in the development of musical instruments. New, intelligently designed ones are coming out; we now have the Daskin (a modernized piano), Dualo Du-touch, Terpstra, LinnStrument and jammer keyboards. All of these are designed to be both easy to learn, fast to play and train the ear accurately. This is not hard – traditional instruments are not designed for any of these things. All of the new instruments have uniform, consistent fingering, that is, if you learn to play a song in a given key, you can play it equally well in all keys, and modulations are easy. Each has unique features.

If these new instruments sound scary-hard to learn, there is now available teaching software that multiplies musical learning speed and it works particularly well on the new gadgets.

The group purpose: to check-out these new instruments, share ideas, experiences and gain extra proficiency in music. This will be lots of fun & interesting.

See www.MusicScienceGuy.com or MusicScienceGuy@gmail.com

MusicScienceGuy’s farewell to the AXiS Keyboards

From Ken Rushton:

“The makers of the innovative 2-D array AXiS-64 and AXiS-49 (sic) alternate Keyboard controllers will soon pull the plug on sales, after 5 years in an unexpectedly tough market.”

“This note is to (a) inform you of the existence of these units for a short while more, just in case you happen to need instrument(s) with 2-dimensional arrays of velocity-sensitive keys, and (b) I’ve persuaded the developers/investors in the Axis to tell us a little of their story, in http://www.musicscienceguy.com/2014/11/farewell-to-the-axis-keyboards.html

“This posting may sober-up anyone that contemplates building a new instrument:”

“I’ve made extensive use of the AXiS-49 controllers, but not as they were intended: reprogrammed the key array; changed the orientation and recolored the keys. They were initially built around a harmonic-table key layout, but a firmware update allowed them to become flexible.”

“I personally believe their story would have been substantially different if they had made an instrument that generic from the start. Moral: target as large a customer base as you can. ”

(Verified here.)