is Isomorphic layout superior to standard piano for a complete newbie?

[meowlicious]

Hi, Sorry if this is an ignorant question. I am completely new to music making/playing, my main goal is to be able to make some music on my computer. I've been trying to learn piano after buying a cheap keyboard off of craigslist using some youtube videos. I am a little turned off of by the pure rote memorization of various 'hand positions' ect , I am lost in the land of ridiculous 'every cow eats grass ' mnemonics.

Then I saw a video of 'scales and notes on push 2' that layout seems so much more logical and fun. you put in time to understand the system instead of rote memorization . But now I am wondering if its so much better why do people bother with ubiquitous piano layout anymore .


Also another side question, is there a midi device with highly sensitive pads like push 2. I want to program these layouts in bitwig but I don't want to spend $600 on push2.

[deastman]

I find the Push 2 buttons very hard and painful after playing for a little while. You could try a Launchpad instead.

My opinion is that you should just bite the bullet and lean to play the keyboard. Every instrument requires learning to play, and that means practice, rote memorization, and hard work. Just dig in and get good at it. You'll be glad you did. Especially when you score a great deal on a vintage Jupiter 8 and can actually play the keyboard!

[Winstontaneous]

Horses for courses, Push 2 has the best pads of any controller I've tried.

There is something enjoyable about having easily transposable intervals/chords on a grid controller.
It's more akin to a stringed instrument where you can slide shapes around the neck without having to learn new fingerings.
IME time dedicated to learning the physical interface of a piano keyboard is time well spent.

[MadBrain]

Chromatic isomorphic layouts have existed on accordions for a long time and they definitely have their fans (especially in Russia, what with the Bayan). The piano layout is still the most popular though.

[tapper mike]

How far do you want to go on your own path and how willing are you to make a commitment to a standardized path?

You aren't going to develop a true sense of harmony on push.

More often then not it isn't the intellect but the physical mechanical memory (fingers, hands, wrists, forearms) that make things happen on any musical instrument that uses ... fingers.

Who will be your teacher?

I love the linnstrument and I've had decades of playing guitar, bass, piano etc. Nonetheless I had to develop my own routines for working out chords, scales, arpeggios and even simple songs. I'm still learning. It's frustrating for me and I get better day by day by praciting day by day. I set two week goals for myself. I don't just sit down on a night when I'm bored once a week and decide I'm going to practice by recording.

Sometimes a teacher isn't enough. I just let go of a student who had the same attitude. He refused to pick up the guitar and practice...except for maybe the day before the lesson. As a consequence I'd have to go through the same material again, and again. He'd get frustrated because he thought he could do something he didn't want to work for. This guy was a serious weight lifter. He'd train and train his body but refuse to dedicate time to work his fingers with one tenth of the commitment that he worked the rest of his body.

A teacher is a good thing. They slow things down and make sure you've mastered something sufficiently before you move on. They'll put sheet music in front of you to play. Playing something simple but well is far better then trying to play something beyond your reach and poorly.

[jancivil]

How far do you want to go on your own path and how willing are you to make a commitment to a standardized path?

You aren't going to develop a true sense of harmony on push.

I think the first paragraph is a concise or even astute assessment of the question.

I don't know why the conventional or standard is the only path to "a true sense of harmony".

I would like the geometric layout of the isomorphic thing because, like Winstontaneous pointed out, the parallelisms which are available to a guitar are here as well; so planing, now more accessible to the hand, is something you can check out, hear, more readily... just as one of the more obvious of possibilities...

I was thinking about this, the piano paradigm seems suited to regular, triadic 'harmony'; but the limitations put to you by the difficulties of fingerings (in keys with certain mixtures of white and black keys), is this part of anything at all to do with the music? I'm not good at chords on a keyboard and I more or less just gave up on it being that kind of tool for me. So I don't have the answer to this. But 'true sense of harmony' dependent on piano as a tool seems kind of cart before the horse to me.

I have a good grasp of harmony in the abstract; when one performs all the part-writing you do in a harmony-oriented coursework, you don't have a keyboard at your little schooldesk, you must have this on five-line staves, and in your head. The proscriptions on our standardized four-part-writing don't stem from location of hands on the piano. And once we're working in groups of voices or instruments the piano may be your tool or it may not be, and again the problems are other issues than the piano's.

But, so, I don't know, good question.

[subject_81]

My 2c

I had a push for a while, love that thing but had to sell most everything and I just started rebuilding my toy collection.

The push really clicked with me, but something told me keys 1st. Now I'm no pianist or keyboardist or an 'ist of any kind, so I got a little mini akai. Then one day while fiddling around on my own the Dorian scale clicked in my brain and it's been a real joy.

But here's where the keys really shine vs the push, there are certain notes that can be temporarily borrowed from other scales to create a little excitement or drama or sadness, etc. And with the push you miss out on those. In all fairness you can turn on the out of scale keys with the push, but then it plays like a wonky keyboard.

I do fully plan on buying another push down the line, but after I get a 49 or 61 key keybed with properly sized keys I don't constantly fat finger .

[acYm]

you can use a grid which is lined up in fourths but isn't locked into a key/mode. this would be a preferable approach for learning. in most genres where you're supposed to care about the music, you want to be able to implement key changes easily.

[PHY6]

If you have an iPad, Geoshred will give you the isomorphic layout.
And it's a great app.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVjw99FaXm4

Never really learned to play keyboards, but this layout seems to be made for me.
After learning on the iPad, I'va aquired a Linnstrument, and love it !

[Triplefox]

I'm enough of a fan of isomorphic layouts that I make QWERTY keybindings for them so that I don't have to have a custom controller or work on a touchscreen. I do, in fact, have an Axis-49 but I rarely pull it out now as I work on a laptop, the setup is inconvenient and risks another drop each time I do so - and I've learned that it doesn't do well with drops. What do I miss by doing that? Velocity (I use a tracker, so I just take a pass to sequence the velocity in, takes 10-20 seconds) and a bit of range and uniformity since QWERTY keyboards tend not to use perfect square or hexagonal layouts and it's easy to run out of keys. These snags aside, it's more than enough to do music with.

Regarding whether it's better than linear, I think it is if you are composing but not composing specifically towards piano players. With any instrument it is important to be sympathetic towards the strengths and weaknesses, and on isomorphic layouts, the relative challenge level shifts around a ton. Weird virtuosic scales on the harmonic table? Easy. "Chopsticks" on the harmonic table? Good luck. If you want to perform live and you aren't using a common instrument you also lose a lot of flexibility, but, well, this is KVR, you're probably here because you like synth sounds and production, not skillful classical piano.

What you get in exchange for giving up that stuff is a instant boost in fluidity with trying ideas; guitar is, I'm told, close to isomorphic in standard tuning and can be retuned to full isomorphism, which may account for some of its popularity. With isomorphism you only have to learn one shape to access a new interval idea from anywhere and as such it becomes easy to lose sight of actually naming anything and instead just fall into "shape A, then shape B, then transpose left". The day I got my Axis-49 was like an instant boost to my intuitive understanding of theory, because I just spent the day trying new shapes and going "oh, okay, so this one is like that." Deciding how much consonance or dissonance you want is very intuitive. Your mind is freed up to focus on building rhythms and arrangements. This is an acceptable trade for me.

[MadBrain]

I'm enough of a fan of isomorphic layouts that I make QWERTY keybindings for them so that I don't have to have a custom controller or work on a touchscreen.

Oh? I've always been much more fan of the 'classic' layout on trackers (the one that's in a piano-line arrangement with one octave starting on Z and one starting on Q... though I didn't have much choice on Impulse Tracker, so it's nice that Modplug Tracker lets you have it your way). I did already have some piano playing experience, so the 'piano' layout was already kinda natural to me. And it's true that you have to learn a few different shapes for everything (typically one for major keys and one for minor keys), but with some scale practice on piano this isn't too hard.

[bmrzycki]

I spent a few years trying to focus on isomorphic layouts instead of the more traditional piano roll I purchased a C-Thru Music Axis-49 and I still enjoy it. There are several iPad apps that approximate this layout too (just search for hexagon harmonic in the app store). Since then I decided to learn the actual piano interface for a couple of reasons:
* it's everywhere - from software to hardware controllers to real pianos, you'll encounter it almost everywhere. for better or worse it's very much a standard.
* scales feel and sound different - the combination of white and black notes that comprise most scales feel different and (IMO) enforce different playing styles. For better or for worse it's at least good to know about this to understand why and how composers of the past used these scales/modes.
* the keys themselves impart a playing style - the weight, feel, and response of a real piano's keys are as much a part of modern composition as the music itself. How fast players could move through runs, how fast notes can repeat, how far apart notes can be for one hand, etc. This has imparted a set of unofficial rules into a large amount of the music you've heard and is part of what makes something sound "real" or not. Even if you never plan on composing for the piano you should at least understand some of these things to make you a better musician.
* cost - piano keybeds are cheap cheap cheap. It's a commodity item for midi controllers. While it may be easier to learn the theory on an isomorphic keyboard you're limiting your future ability to interact and use what is (and will likely continue to be) the majority of keyboads on the market.


If I could talk to my past self I would have recommended learning scales on things like iOS instruments that allow you to configure the scale of the keyboard. Many apps do this like Thor, Animoog, Korg's excellent offerings, and Garageband. Tools like Navichord are great too because they show how the chrods are built. Once I started to "see" the interval pattern I would encourage myself to play with the same scale/chords on a real keyboard. I think that alone would have helped me a ton to get past a lot of the learning curve.

And don't underestimate the value of a good piano teacher.

[Bojmir Raj Raj]

My 84 year-old dad has always been fond of saying things like "there is no easy way!" and "you don't see olympic weightlifters working out by lifting ping-ping balls, do you?", LOL! If you've seen the Simpson's episode where Krusty the Klown's rabbi dad says to him "you..you clown!", then you've already seen the dead-on perfectly accurate caricature of my dad.

And he's right of course- there are no shortcuts and effortless ways to achieve things that take a huge amount of work and time!

The "realistic" answer is that you should get a Halberstadt (that's the technical name of "the usual") keyboard and take piano lessons! Ironically, that's kinda useless for me because I use 17 tones to the octave, not 12, and would need an isometric keyboard if I wanted to play keyboard.

[commerce]

Is Isomorphic layout superior to standard piano for a complete newbie?

Yes, it is.