Seems to have some interesting features built in details here

Enjoy

Bill

very cool - would give left hand bass lines a tremendous boost without needing to resort to using the pitch bend..nice find Bill!

I like!

I remember some older home organs (I think it might have been a Yamaha) where you would do a finger vibrato side to side and it would pick it up. Back in the 70's...

The pitch bend thing, I'm not so sure about. Pitch bending is really independent of hitting the note. Sometimes you bend first, then hit the note. And bending isn't all up... It's up AND down. Hand position and the scale or arp you are playing often dictates where the finger needs to be, which may not be where you want to be able to do a controlled slide.

Overall, the best bending I've come across so far is the pitch strip on keytars. It falls under the natural hand position that has served guitarists for centuries, and you can do bends up/down, but also jump up/down, which is great for trills and hammer-on/offs, or tongued lines.

I've often thought that an ARP Odyssey type two pressure pad system for bending (they had this on later models of the Odyssey) would be really good at your feet. Or some kind of larger scale pitch strip.

But overall, combining playing with your hands with also having control pitch with each individual key seems more of a gimmick. As the article tends to imply.

If you watch the video carefully you'll see that the player bends pitch down as well as up. I do believe that he bends down more often than up.

It's inevitable that you will have to learn some new technique to make use of it. But it's also clear that you gain some pretty big benefits for certain kinds of instruments if you go to the trouble. If you don't want to make use of it just turn off the sensors and do things the traditional way.

Some previous efforts (which ultimately failed) fundamentally changed the feel of the keys, for example a keybed where the keys themselves wiggled side-to-side. This one doesn't (or shouldn't, although the current "stick-on" implementation certainly will change the feel of the keys).

This technology is sort of like today's aftertouch but polyphonic and multi-function. Aftertouch on keyboards today is usually only of the channel variety (one sensor for the entire keyboard) and is relatively expensive (manufacturers routinely remove it when cost reducing). And it changes the feel when a key bottoms out, which is one of the reasons you almost never see it on piano-action keybeds. Perhaps this technology could change all of that.

Unfortunately, this technology looks like it is even more expensive than aftertouch. Assuming that the cost could be reduced, to be commercially successful I believe it has to be completely integrated into a keybed by a keyboard manufacturer. And it has to be almost (or in fact totally) invisible. Stick-ons just won't do.

As for the article "tending" to imply that this is a gimmick I don't interpret what is written that way. Not at all.

You can't bend a note BEFORE you strike it with this system. You have to take your fingers OFF the key to raise the hand to strike the note, and the pitch information is lost at that point.

Look, all the instruments you are trying to imitate use TWO hands to achieve the effect you are trying to get with one (with only one finger, actually). A violinist does not try to achieve vibrato with the bow... The production of the note and its control after being sounded is handled by different hands.

There have been innumerable half baked ideas touted to get more control from what is, essentially, a percussion instrument (that you are striking the piano with your fingers rather than mallets doesn't change the fact that you can do little to the note with your fingers AFTER the the strike). Aftertouch is the simplest... and there have been a bunch of keyboards with polyphonic aftertouch as well as mono. To start, poly aftertouch was expensive, unreliable, and difficult to control predictably.

If poly aftertouch lived up to the hype, and gave us controllable effects, it would have been far more successful. And we would see it on most keyboards (like we do velocity sensitivity). But it suffers from the one thing you can't do a whole lot about... the strength of each finger is quite different. Strike a note with your index finger, you can apply quite a bit of force for the aftertouch (which helps the electronics detects it separate from just the impact force of hitting the note). But hit that exact same note with your little finger, you can only apply a fraction of the pressure. And the keyboard certainly can't figure out which finger hits each note!

TBH, I seem to remember the 'side to side' sensitivity for the organ I played was only used on a smaller, solo sound third manual, and didn't affect playability much, if at all. Yet that idea withered on the vine.

Look, every year at NAMM, we see some basement inventor rolling out some supposed new 'improvement' to what we have in the way of control with keyboard playing. They all get a bit of interest from those that can't see the impracticality of them, but they also all die the death when the reality of practical use, or affordable production and acceptance rears its ugly head.

I put this one in with the flying cars idea... SEEMS like a good idea until you think about the consequences of the majority of our moronic car drivers actually being allowed to be that stupid a few thousand feet ABOVE ground instead of merely on the ground!

No, you can't bend a note before you strike it. But if you watch the video again you'll see that he hits the notes he's going to bend down near the hinge and swipes toward the key edge from there. It looks and sounds like he slides a semitone down by playing the key a semitone higher than his destination note.

Hey, they're not saying they can do anything with this system. They're just saying they can add a lot of expression to keyboard playing, which I think is undeniable.

Is this a half-baked idea? I don't think so. Is it economically viable? That remains to be seen. It certainly is not viable in its present form. I think it will have to be much cheaper to implement than polyphonic aftertouch ever was (that being the main reason you don't see the latter anymore, not its difficulty of control). And it has to be so unobtrusive that you can't tell it's there if you don't enable it.

I'm sorry, but I don't agree. Hand position determines your strike point on a key. You are thinking in terms of one note, but we all know that music is a series of notes (often very rapid) where the strike point is mostly a function of where your hand happens to be when you need that particular note. Nobody is able to place each individual finger higher or lower on the key surface depending on what you subsequently want to do with the note.

I rather like the idea of a sideways rocking to get finger vibrato, but again, how does the machine figure out what is your deliberate intent, and what is merely the motion of your finger going down and coming off with a sideways component? You already come across this problem if you set aftertouch sensitivity up high enough that you don't have to press very hard to activate it (so that even your pinky could use it, for instance), and now every single note gets a 'blip' of aftertouch data simply from the strike force of the key..! Make aftertouch do something other than the subtlest effect, and you have some nasty things happening.

I am VERY interested in getting the most control I possibly can from keyboard playing, and I've played just about everything out there that attempted to get better control. Other than LH controls, little has ever been of any use trying to get more emotion from simply one hand playing by itself. Aftertouch has been the most successful, and mono AT the only one practical enough and affordable. This doesn't strike me as either.

I am FAR more interested in alternative approaches to things you can do with your LH to ADD expression to the right, or with voice programming tricks (like SA2, SuperNatural, etc.) that analyzes your playing and substitutes the appropriate samples to better reflect what you played. I can honestly see far more use for something that figured out your note playing density, and adjusted vibrato speed based on that (slow passages are generally vibrato'd slower than quick ones by most players) or adjusted the delay of an LFO onset depending on tempo and note density (which is another common function) than something that I have to utterly change my RH (and LH!) technique to be able to use (if it WAS possible to change enough for it to be practical).

Then there's the question of your feet... Drummers, organists, pedal steel players, many types of instruments have discovered that there is a LOT of creative control lying below your knees! There's a ton of things you can do to enable good pitch control with foot controllers, a FAR simpler and cheaper (and already existent) system than this one!

TBH, you are looking at only one to two axes of control by moving your finger about on the key surface. And some VERY complicated adjustments to your technique to fully control it. Two footpedals would achieve the same degree of control, with FAR less adjustment to technique...

The idea is the RESULT, not the process. This touchphone key system looks like an utterly impractical and highly expensive way to do something you could do with one or two control pedals. Look, no-one is suggesting that you press a button on the bow of a violin to enable vibrato... something already exists that achieves it. But here we have some sort of Heath Robinson gimmick to do something that two pedals could do just as easily.

So, the question... Why?

I said undeniable because you can watch the guy in the video (and in the other two videos at the website linked in the article) add slides and vibrato that you can't do with the average keyboard. Maybe he's the only one in the world who can do it because he's practised it but one of the linked academic papers says otherwise. (You did read the papers before you formed your opinion, right?) BTW, the papers answer some of your objections. Of course, I hardly expect you will find them convincing given that you've already made your mind up.

I'm not as sure as you that two pedals could do this just as easily. Pedal technique takes practise too, especially if you're controlling two of them independently (in addition to controlling both of your hands independently, of course). I submit that you can't yourself be certain it's easier until you have actually tried both, which of course you haven't.

Clearly, if any real products eventually come from this you are not the target customer. So why so vociferous in your condemnation? It's not like anyone who has anything to do with it is listening.

One feature that I find incredibly handy on the Audya is that you can set it up so that if you press either the left or right hand a little harder (pre-adjustable setting) that you can create an immediate drum fill. I use it all the time & it saves reaching for the appropriate button at the required time.

Henni