Thanks for drawing this to my attention! I did see it on the Dynamic Tonality website at http://www.dynamictonality.com/relayer.htm – and it looks like a very powerful tool, if you either want to use your normal computer keyboard as a controller – which can be a neat solution to having a self-contained computer-based music synthesis system; or, as I was doing, exploring using cheap plug-in USB QWERTY keyboards. In both cases you end up with something better than an imitation of a conventional ‘piano-style’ keyboard.

I haven’t blogged about Dynamic Tonality yet, I’ve only alluded to it once in relation to isomorphic keyboard layouts. I’ve done this deliberately, because as far as I’m concerned Dynamic Tonality is ‘The Big Issue’ in tonal synthesised music! I might post about it now it’s come up, but in the meantime I would urge anyone who doesn’t know what it means to go to that website and find out immediately!

It will become clear that the issues of Dynamic Tonality and isomorphic keyboards are intimately connected, and an app like your Relayer is going to be the kind of tool people will need to explore it. Even for those who know about Relayer, it’s worth mentioning that new versions or Windows and Mac OS have just been put up.

BTW, I like the Apple keyboards because the keys have a fairly small travel, and don’t protrude much, which makes glissandos nice and easy…

Andy Milne

It would be awkward to have to press the Shift key at the same time as pressing a note key every time, so this keyboard needed something to keep the Shift key pressed while playing. I didn’t want to do anything permanent to the keyboard, like gluing the key down, so I looked for a suitable clip, which could be slid on and off when needed.

There are two types of clips that do this job: a drawing board clip, used by artists and architects; and a table cloth clip, as used in the home. They all look something like this:

For a drawing board or table, the flat side would be on top and the bent side, which acts a spring, putting pressure on the end and holding it tight, would be out of the way underneath. For my application, I needed to use it the opposite way round, with the flat side underneath, so the keyboard could still stand on the desktop in the usual way.

I liked the look of the drawing board clip best, but in the end I found some table cloth clips in the sale in a local home shop, and bough those. They looked like this:

Because i thought they stuck up rather high and might interfere with playing, I experimented with bending them into flatter shapes. This is the one I currently use:

In this way, the ‘blue’ keyboard outputs different ASCII numbers from the ‘red’ keyboard, and can be interpreted separately by the program Pure Data which I use with the ‘double-keyboard’ arrangement.