[A first try with my Striso duet prototype]

On 8/29/2021 at 11:09 PM, Łukasz Martynowicz said:

Regarding hand freedom without the strap, take a look at my handle design

Nice handle design @Łukasz! I'd be curious to try something like that with the Striso.

[A first try with my Striso duet prototype]

To clarify: normally the left hand layout is rotated, so the low notes are near the hand palm on both sides.

The flip option rotates the left hand 180°, so on both hands the flats are on the thumb side and the sharps on the pinky side. What is unusual for concertina standards is that this makes the low notes farthest away and the high notes nearest.

 

 

@soloduetWhile it would be nice to have an option for a mirrored layout (with the low notes near the hand palm), that would need different physical placement of the buttons, like the picture of @Jim2010 above. Otherwise the sharp notes would be two octaves higher than the flat notes.

[Midi Hayden Duet? Assessing Demand]

Don, I agree the sawtooth wave is no beauty, but bear in mind this was just a quick revival of a 2010 project which now has the added choice of a low latency ugly sound

If you want to play with tuning exploration and the wicki keyboard layout with more beautiful sound there is a nice free synth called 2032, http://dynamictonality.com/2032.htm

 

 

Actually, it should be necessary in any setting other that 12 Tone Equal Temperament, yes? Because a Meantone, Just, etc. need to be anchored to a specific pitch, and the intervals are better for intervals in that key, but worse in others, yes? Or is the computer constantly recalculating which is note to anchor the temperament to?

'Anchoring' the tuning is necessary when the tuning system has more dimensions than the note layout, which is the case when using meantone (2D) on a piano (1D), or 5 limit just intonation (3D) on a 2D button lattice. However the whole syntonic tuning continuum is 2D, and as such perfectly fits a 2D isomorphic keyboard. I hope that makes sense, it's a complex topic

About the Striso, the main goal is to make a standalone instrument with its own unique sound (which is far from final). I really like to keep it affordable, which for me would mean well below thousand euro. At the same time I want to keep it wood, and no doubt there will be different versions.
And since there are many more creative souls I think it is a nice idea to make a more bare bones version of the keyboard available for use in DIY instruments.

One of my greater goals is broader use of isomorphic and tuning invariant note layouts.

I know the Dualo, it indeed has many similarities and also an interesting (isomorphic and tuning invariant!) keyboard, and as you say, there is still plenty of room in this world for compact isomorphic keyboards.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts

[Midi Hayden Duet? Assessing Demand]

Hello concertina players, Piers here.

 

The DCompose layout is indeed a sheared version of the Wicki/Hayden layout. This has all the benefits of W-H, with the added benefit that the pitch axis is clear, the pitch height of a note is directly related to the y-axis. This makes it a bit easier to learn, and it can be cut off straight with the lowest notes in the same octave (in W-H the lowest As and the lowest Gis would differ by one octave).

I expect Hayden concertina players will pick it up without too much effort.

The Striso doesn't have the bellow expression, but the pressure and direction sensitive buttons and motion sensor make more than up for that.

 

I have been looking for a Hayden concertina a while ago, but decided to rebuilt the keyboard of my accordion to have the DCompose layout, the same way as the Striso. I'll post a video of that sometime soon.

 

The latency of the Karplus Strong synthesizer is indeed a bit too high, so I made another version of the app with a simple sawtooth wave, see http://www.toverlamp.org/static/wickisynth/wickisynth_lowlatency.html. An interesting thing to do is to press space (sustain) and then a major or minor chord, and then change the slider.

 

The reason the pitch sounds a bit different is that Karplus-Strong is initialized randomly, so the intensity of the overtones is different on each press.

 

Have fun and I'm curious to hear what people that would like to have a midi Hayden concertina think of the Striso.