Perfect Layout

[MilesParker]

As promised / threatened, here's my take ... (the discussion of 6+ starts around 7:50). Expect a rough cut with lots of egregiously misleading information. Also, I am not particularly looking for technique critiques at this point, haha.
https://youtu.be/ZDCiYL-dAes

[Roger_Linn]

Thanks for making this, Miles. I’ve linked to it from my YouTube channel’s new “Tutorials” playlist.

[werzel]

I've barely scratched the surface with my Linny explorations, but they do seem to have begun in a different manner than those that have been brought up here. I come from guitar and bass, which I played as a right-handed player.
The first thing that occurred to me was that I did not want to abandon the developed dexterity that was already present in my fret (left) hand in order to play a new instrument. In line with thinking this way, I laid out the Linny to ascend from right to left. This layout, no matter the tuning, allows me to see the fingerboard in the same way that I would the fretboard of a guitar or bass. I also allows me to use the same fingerings while using my (already) dominant hand. Most key players will have the opposite approach, as their right hand will be more dexterous.
I'm still trying to work out whether I prefer using a split or not, and how I would like that split to be applied, but my initial leaning is towards a mirrored approach that has the right hand ascending to the right in order to have truly mirrored fingering.

[Roger_Linn]

Hi werzel,

I'm a guitarist and notice that in my videos, I play solos with my left hand for the very reason you mentioned. However, for me it doesn't help to reverse the pitch direction because LinnStrument's default pitch direction (higher pitches at right) is the same as a guitar. It's all good-- whatever works for you is best.

[MilesParker]

So this is fascinating and fun. From a sample of three right-handed (?) guitarists, we each arrived at different arrangements. As obvious from video, I tend to favour my right hand for melodic playing, similar to a piano player I guess even though I don't play.* This was a semi-concious decision. I think it comes down to the fact that there isn't actually a perfect mapping, since of course playing guitar the fretboard orientation is away from us; i.e. we don't actually *play* fretboard diagrams, from the perspective our hands we play the reverse side, i.e. our palms are on the high strings ("top") and our fingertips are on the low side ("bottom"). Further, on guitar our index finger is closest to the nut ("left") and our pinky closest to the saddle ("left"). It's the kind of thing you don't think about until you do, haha... there is no way to use a) same hand, b) same note arrangement as in fretboard diagrams and c) same fingerings as guitar when playing the Linnstrument on a surface. Wezel picked (a) and (c), I picked (b) and Roger picked (a) and (b).

(* And my left hand for chords? Not sure what's up with that! Again, perhaps a piano thing.)

What's interesting to me is that until Werzel mentioned it I never even really thought about what hand I was using. It just felt more fluid with my right hand and whatever gymnastics my mind and body did behind the scenes, the mapping even in +5 felt most natural .. that is, somehow I kind of felt the "muscle memory" even though it wasn't the same muscles; or rather, it was the same muscles, just on the opposite hand! I guess I semi-conciously picked my right hand because it preserved having my index finger on the nut side. (And from the practical side, one problem with using my left hand and reverse the row pitch, is it would mean playing with my left hand toward the right for low notes, which would require me crossing my right hand over left if playing higher accent notes!)

Perhaps I have more independent dexterity in my right hand because I've spent a fair amount of time playing fingerstyle, or perhaps it's because I do a ton of touch typing in my job and so my right hand is simply used to getting to arbitrary locations quickly. But when I just tried it, fast runs with my left hand feel *much* more awkward. And I just tried reversing the pitch (global column 1, row 4) and was completely lost. To me that argues that my internal visual mapping (the Grid "looks like" a fretboard and I know immediately where everything is) to dominate my kinesthetic mapping (my index, middle, ring and pinky of same hand land on same notes).

But I think the way more interesting thing is to "where" these mappings live alongs our brain / body pathways. I guess we tend to be very literal about "muscle memory" in that we assume it means to reproduce as closely as possible the exact same muscle movements in order to preserve our lifetime of acquired movement patterns. But what if the chain is more complicated than that: i.e. a note comes to mind, we translate that to a map of notes, we map that to the physical instrument and then translate it to a learned gesture. (Or something like that.) For me, breaking the translation of the visual map of notes to the physical instrument is more costly from a relearning perspective than it is to break the translation from hand to physical location. (And that is supported by fact that I can translate to +6 by doing a little diagonal translation between rows, relative semi-tone locations within row of course remains same.)

To counter that thought, we know that if we pick up a pen with our non-dominant hand, most of us struggle to even write our own names. Again, perhaps it works for me because unlike with writing, the movement patterns are complete mirror images, so maybe I'm still preserving part of the neural pathway chain.

Sorry, that was pretty stream of consciousness, but I'd like to close by making that larger point again. When you look at talented multi-instrumentalists -- I have friends like this, and also thinking about this watching "Get Back" and seeing Beatles tackle different instruments, with varying levels of success -- there is some kind of magic to the way they translate their musical maps to wildly different contexts. Perhaps we spend too much effort trying to preserve the hard skills that we acquired over many years of challenge and effort, but being attached to that isn't actually the most efficient way for many of us to translate our softer (for lack of better word) skills and knowledge to this new instrument. So I guess that's the core of the answer to this mapping dilemma that I'm beginning to gravitate toward; to treat the Linnstrument is a unique tool in its own right, and where that conflicts with our learned previous knowledge to be ruthless enough to toss it aside.

[MilesParker]

FWIW, I just tried playing with my left hand in +6, still rooted on the root but using thumb toward centre/right, so identical fingering as right hand except reversing fingers and moving up a row, and was able to execute it reasonably well, and I'm guessing I would soon be just as comfortable on that hand. So again for me it's the visual mapping/orientation that seems to matter most. But I don't have anywhere near the mileage of others and am (obviously) no virtuoso..

So...I continue to suspect that we may be over-estimating the cost of learning different fingering arrangements. To test theory I'd be super curious if anyone who has spent a lot of time with one layout / hand arrangement put in a few hours of practice over a week or so with a different one, how quickly they get comfortable with other arrangements.

[monch1962]

I'm a left handed guitarist/bassist, so a large part of my early music career was spent trying to track down left handed instruments that weren't cheap rubbish. Nearly all music shops I've been to in Australia carry a single lefty guitar or bass, but I suspect they've been sitting in the shop for years because (a) there's very few lefty guitarists around to buy them, (b) they're cheap, crappy instruments, (c) the shops are absolutely DESPERATE to shift that one lefty guitar that's been around for ages, so the instant you pick it up they're only thinking dollar signs.

As virtually all my friends were right handed, I learned pretty quickly to play a right handed guitar left handed, with the strings upside down. That came from e.g. wanting to find out for myself what a Les Paul sounded like, when I had a Strat - much easier to borrow a mate's Les Paul and give it a go than to try to hunt one down. Pretty sure every LH guitarist can find their way around a RH guitar for that one reason.

When I picked up Chapman Stick, I had to rewire my brain a bit to make sense of everything being backwards. It probably didn't help that half the strings are tuned in ascending 4ths and the other half in descending 5ths... Strangely I found it much easier to pick up playing Stick bass with my left hand in 5ths, than playing Stick melody with my right hand (my guitar fretting hand) in 4ths.

Given all that, it still wouldn't make sense to me to play Linnstrument with reversed pitch, so the highest note was on the left hand side of the row. That'd sort of be like writing right to left - I know languages like Hebrew work that way, but my brain is locked into reading & writing from left to right. After decades of looking at guitar chord diagrams that are written for RH guitar, I just automatically reverse them in my head if I want to play them on guitar - there's no conscious effort in doing that.

I'm fascinated by this whole discussion, but suspect +5 is just embedded in my brain at this point as THE way. It probably helps that I can work through chord changes in +5 without having to think about where each interval is... At one point I tried Fripp's crafty tuning on guitar (CGDAEG, so mostly 5ths) and it made sense logically, but didn't work for me in practice.

Similarly playing Stick in 5ths works fine for me, but it's just a different instrument (and right handed) so I don't have muscle memory issues when I switch between Stick and guitar. I have no "context switching" problems in switching between the two instruments, but couldn't that the knowledge of how to play a song on Stick and directly transfer that to guitar without a lot of thinking. I imagine it's something like switching between guitar and e.g. oboe - the knowledge is transferrable, but technique is completely different.

The human brain is a really fascinating thing

[MilesParker]

I'm fascinated by this whole discussion, but suspect +5 is just embedded in my brain at this point as THE way. It probably helps that I can work through chord changes in +5 without having to think about where each interval is... At one point I tried Fripp's crafty tuning on guitar (CGDAEG, so mostly 5ths) and it made sense logically, but didn't work for me in practice.

Makes sense. This point seems more salient than muscle memory per se... it's more the map from the music in your head to the shapes on the board. And perhaps 4ths really is simply better suited to some chordal shapes w/ extensions. I don't have the benefit of a deep 'library' of (thinking jazz here) non-open chord shapes, so for me I'd be giving up a lot less. As mentioned on video, +5 shapes are preserved exactly in +6 if you imagine them projected along a diagonal, but that would probably require an additional processing step as it were and might not provide practical fingering.

The human brain is a really fascinating thing

Yes, it is!

Which somewhat OT, or maybe exactly on topic, I've been thinking about the whole dominate hand thing. As in, what does that mean, exactly? Like a lot of things, seems obvious until you dig into it. It's always sort of puzzled me that right-handed guitarists fret with their left hand, and vis vs. I would be tempted to think of it as less of a biomechanical thing than a social construct, *except* for the fact that lefties pretty universally don't feel comfortable strumming with their right hand. Of course fretting takes more dexterity and strength in fingers and hand, but otoh there is something "dominate" about timing and rhythm of attack of strumming plus use of more of body that perhaps makes that the more 'active' component? Like throwing vs. catching in baseball -- both important, but one engages more systems and requires more precise timing?

Which leads me to wonder ... what if anything is the equivalent 'dominant' hand doing differently vs the non-dominant when playing Linnstrument? On Piano you could say melody vs chords, but that's probably more an accident of the fact that piano pitch runs from left to right as it does with Linstrument.

[dr_loop]

It's always sort of puzzled me that right-handed guitarists fret with their left hand, and vis vs. I would be tempted to think of it as less of a biomechanical thing than a social construct

Yes, that puzzled me too, because string fingering usually seems to be much more complex than just strumming, plucking or bowing.
But I would think less of a "dominance", but of the special characteristics of the left/right hand or better: of the corresponding brain hemispheres.

And then it fits quite seamlessly: the right hemisphere/left hand is better at spatial patterns, the right hand/left hemisphere better at temporal patterns

We call the right hand dominant only because temporal arrangement is crucial for actual action in general and for language in particular.

So the construction of (most) musical instruments is not a mere accident (....of wind instruments maybe is)

[MilesParker]

And then it fits quite seamlessly: the right hemisphere/left hand is better at spatial patterns, the right hand/left hemisphere better at temporal patterns

Bam! That makes so so much sense. It even works for baseball comparison, where throwing is about timing (+ mechanics), whereas catching is about having your hand in the right place. (Oddly, I've always thrown with my left hand, not sure what to make of that.) Even makes sense for piano (for righties anyway) since melody is more dependent on timing and chords have a kind of spatial sense. Cool.

[Aardman]

I came from piano, guitar, mandolin, winds and chromatic button accordion, the latter of which is the closest of all to playing the LinnStrument, but not exactly. I also have a harpjji, which is the same isomorphic idea.
You can't really set up a LinnStrument like one of these accordions because the buttons are offset.
However, the rows are in stacked minor thirds which, if I was going to pick an alternative to the tritone layout would be my next favorite choice.
With m3's every possible interval is within easy reach of every other interval, and, each octave occupies a perfectly shaped rectangle.
Even better, I've been experimenting with alternative scales, and made a custom set-up for nine-note to the octave scales on the LinnStrument using nine different colored LEDs to display the scale steps. When using minor third row offsets this set up creates a perfect square shape per octave/mode in nine note divisions. I've never such ease working with nine note scale divisions before. It even makes playing in each "mode" of the scare simple. If you try to play one of these on a regular piano keyboard though you have to do a mental flip of considering a M6 interval an octave (C,A,F#,Eb makes four octaves)- it's a real nightmare - but on the LinnStrument it's childs play.
Perhaps when I figure out how to post pictures here I'll share one - it would explain it better than I'm doing here.

[sdownie]

Hi!

I'm a new/old Linnstrument owner, with my new LI 128 scheduled to arrive on Monday, Jan 31, 2022. (a.k.a. Schubert's 225th birthday). I bought my "old" LNL00337 on Sept. 17, 2015 from Perfect Circuit and returned it a few weeks later. Perhaps one of you inherited it?

The Perfect Layout has been my quest for 60 years (on and off), but the definition of perfection has changed over time. Now I'm more of a lump who wants to sit in a comfy chair and wiggle my fingers.

= Begin non-Linnstrument rambling. Jump to the next section to return to LI talk. =

The (standard) piano requires me to sit in a particular place with a particular posture, something I am no longer interested in doing. A (standard) guitar or bass forces me to stick my (heavy) left arm waaay out there, while running the risk of irritating the uncalloused ends of my tender keyboardist fingers. Boo! The (standard) clarinet makes me blow through it! (What if I catch a cold?) The autoharp doesn't lend itself to bebop solos. And don't even get me started on the bassoon. So traditional "acoustic" layouts are out.

Optimal electric-instrument layouts have proven to be elusive, but in more subtle ways. You can't play a Theremin sitting down. The Eigenharp Pico had the most sensitive physical buttons I've ever experienced, but the software (back in 2008) was a mess. Instruments that use capacitive touch, such as AKAI's EWI USB Wind instrument, don't "switch" even remotely like their "acoustic" forebears. The mechanical switches on the Yamaha WX11 wind controller weren't any better.

Then there was an endless procession of MIDI keyboard controllers. The Yamaha KX88 was my mainstay for many years. It wasn't at all piano-like in feel, but it was predictable enough with its (limited) MIDI output to get the job done. Until it became too big physically.

Mini-sized keyboards (e.g. Korg, Casio, Yamaha, etc) initially give one a feeling of power - "I can reach an 11th!" - but extracting consistent MIDI data out of them (e.g. performing predictable velocity values) is a challenge. The inconsistency-of-output problem also rears its head on my ROLI Seaboard BLOCK, breaking my heart. At the moment, my two favorite mini-keys are the Yamaha Reface CP and the Arturia KeyStep 37.

There were "guitar" controllers as well. A couple from Starr Labs, a first-gen JamStik, a chepie whose name I can't remember at the moment, and the Gutiar Hero controllers that MusicLab's plugins claimed to harness (in odd ways). Of course, the early generations of pitch-to-MIDI guitar pickups suffered from too much latency and monophonic intent.

When the Lemur first appeared, I was enthralled. But the hardware was simply too expensive to take a chance on. The iPad learned how to fake "velocity" in some music apps, but those efforts were doomed from the start. The Sensel Morph had quite a bit of promise and, like just about all the other devices mentioned above, can serve particular needs well. But it never worked (for me) as a device I could use on a larger scale (such as depending on it to generate a wide span of precise MIDI events). My three Lightpad Ms offer the best "flat screen" performance of my current controller crop. But ROLI, as a company, is struggling and their service has been terrible (for me). (I had to wait four months to get un-bricked Lightpad Ms after one of their software updates went awry.)

Finally, we come to the Bayan or B-system chromatic-button-accorion layout. The Bayan is not to be confused with a "Janko" layout. No matter one's politics, one must admit that Russia and Eastern Europe generated some pretty imprssive musical output during the 20th Century. I think the B-system layout is another product of fine musical thinking. Chromatic continuity is not the basis for the vast majoriy of music we hear. Minor seconds are not typically regarded as pleasing to the ear. The Russians realized this and created a layout that deemphasizes (a little) the minor second and emphasizes major seconds and minor thirds. If you seek out Bayan performances on YouTube, you'll be treated to some mind-bendingly speedy renditions of works that would be prohibitively difficult to execute on "Western" instrumental layouts.

Smitten by the clever Bayan layout, I experimented with whatever Bayan-ness I could render on available "Western" musical hardware. I laid out B-system patterns on standard computer keyboards (super ungratifying) and Starr Labs Ztars (sorta flaky). But lacking any Bayan-friendly sources of info (these were the earlier days of the 'Net), I gave up.

About six years ago - just after I'd purchased my first LI - I stumbled into a screaming deal on a Roland FR-2b MIDI accordion. The thing is covered with velocity-sensitive buttons! Heaven! For that reason (plus a few more I'll mention when I return to the LI below), I returned the LI and began taking Bayan lessons.

However, it turns out while the FR-2b bristles with MIDI controls, it isn't a gratifying accordion, squeeze-wise. Specifically, Roland's first-gen MIDI boxes miscalculated how bellows interact with reeds in a "real" accordion. My Bayan lessons were becoming exercises in frustration because it was tough to "phrase" the Roland in the same way that one could "phrase" an acoustic device. Of course there are digital adjustments one can fiddle with, but this was a fundamental design flaw. (That's why Roland soon came out with the updated "x" series of MIDI accordions.)

As time passed, I grew ever lazier. Sure, I could operate the FR-2b's MIDI buttons without using bellows. But then I've still got to put up with this 16-pound thing pressing on my chest. Too heavy! I can't see the buttons while I play! The Roland was set aside.

A few years later I found the ATEMP MB1, a B-system MIDI keyboard constructed by Roger's Russian counterpart.

https://atemp.ru/en/products/atemp_mb1.html

The MB1 is a very tummy-pleasing size and built like a T-34 (tank). It is also quite expensive for what you get. Alas, the buttons are not velocity sensitive and they require a rather firm press to operate. I wanted to love this form factor so much that I thought I could overlook those issues. I can't.

I was getting so discouraged that I was going to downshift all the way back to either a three-string Loog electric guitar or a four-string RISA ukulele. Then I remembered that I'm a computer guy. So it was back to my trio of Lightpad Ms until the LI 128 resurfaced.

= End non-Linnstrument rambling. =

Some of the reasons I bailed on my first LI have been addressed in its evolution. I'm looking forward to greater touch sensitivity, for example. Some of my reasons for bailing the first time still remain: I wanted to create any layout I chose (which at the time was the B-system chromatic-button-accordion layout). At the end of the day, we're still building devices that accommodate hardware - be it mechanical or electronic - more than the human performer. As an engineer and UI designer, that bugs me. But I reluctantly admit that we can only do what we can economically do.

I've been practicing with the fourths layout so maybe I can live with it this time around. I'll also check out using different intervals between the "strings." But as others have said in your various threads, if you choose one approach and stick with it, you'll be farther ahead (performance-wise) than if you keep messing around with alternate configurations.

Thanks for listening!

Scott

[Aardman]

I'm going to skip over a lot of that to let you know that the closest you're going to get to at B or C feel on the LinnStrument is to set the row offset to +3, however, if you still have your Sensel Morph I've created custom chromatic button B and C layouts that work like a charm on it, and I'd be glad to share them with you. They're fully MPE comparable to boot.

I'm more of a C griff layout myself, but created both of them just to add variety.

[Fannon]

Really interesting and extensive thread here! Another one is: viewtopic.php?t=501725

I'm a new LinnStrument owner (1 week) and still trying to get my feel what the best layout for chords and melody lines would be. My background is that I do play guitar on maybe intermediary level. But not really played much the last years.

Tritone layout seems to make most sense to me for the beginning. With rather small hands, I'm a bit worried about having to stretch to much. With Tritone (+6) I need 4 fingers and a bit of stretch, with +5 three fingers without stretching is enough.

[Roger_Linn]

Welcome, Fannon. Most people use the default 4ths tuning, but those in the thread you referenced prefer the tritone tuning. My feeling it that it's fun to explore both ways and see where each one leads you musically. The reward is in the journey.