Yes, unfortunately, that’s correct! It’s really a cheap and simple way to experience isomorphic keyboards before deciding whether you want to spend money on, for example, an Axis 49 or Axis 64. These, of course, are polyphonic and velocity-sensitive.

Hope you found the article useful, though!

Andy

Thanks for confirming the RetroTech connection – looking forward to stylophone350s.com and those ‘brand new’ Californian 350S’s.

Thanks also for placing the source of the Ben Jarvis quote. 350S owners are a more exclusive bunch than I realised!

Good luck with your project,

Andy

You were correct about RetroTech being the owner of stylophone350s.com. I’ve been quite slow to get the actual site up and running because of some family and health issues these past few months, but hope to have at least the beginning up by the end of this month. It’s my hope that it will become a place for a 350s community of sorts, and I hope that those who purchase units from me or that are fans of the Stylophone in general will share their creations and learnings with others on the site.

I came to the Stylophone world quite accidentally, as I had the great fortune to discover a large cache of brand new in the box units in a storage space in Beverly Hills, where they’d been since at least the early 80′s. If you’re curious, I have written a draft “press” release that I’d be happy to send you with information about the find. (Oh, also the quote from Ben Jarvis was from he and I’s correspondence.)

Feel free to e-mail me if you’re interested, and I’ll certainly let you know when I have more than the splash page up and running. Thanks!

Chris
RetroTech

Thanks very much – it’s surprising how little there is on the 350S on the web, isn’t it?

I’ve added a little extra information and improved some of the photos since the original post.

Andy

Jan

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

Andy

I haven’t experimented enough with the different layouts yet to know which I might use, but as well as the two text files in the post, I’ve just found this one: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/andymurkin/Electronica/MidIntPcKeysAMHarmonic.txt which I must have written at the same time to map the QWERTY keyboard to the Harmonic Table layout.

Ken.

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.

This is the controller I made for it:

Yes, it looks like a length of plastic guttering – but I did say somewhere on the blog that I was looking for low-cost ways of achieving things . . . I found this in my garden shed: it was an offcut left over from a length I bought some time ago at a car boot sale.

The player side is to the left, and the 4 single-pole momentary switches are inclined slightly this way, for ease of use. The two on the left are for hi-hat sounds, the two on the right for bass drum sounds. The 15-pin cable is plugged in on the right hand-side, away from the player’s feet.

Inside you can see the simple connections from the switches to the socket – no electronics required, the Superstylonanophone recognises the switch presses and outputs MIDI instructions accordingly.

(When I connected wires inside the Superstylonanophone, I made a diagram to show which notes or which drums were connected to which of the 15 pins, so I knew which pin to connect to which switch in the foot controller).

This, together with the two styluses, has made playing MIDI drums a little more natural on the Superstylonanophone.

I’m delighted you found my blog, which has only been up for a few days, and honoured that you chose to write a comment!

I’m very surprised if, as you say, Integrator isn’t more well-used – it’s a great program and was exactly what I needed for this application. I hope I explained it correctly!

I apologise for not using your recommended method of text-file naming – I knew when I was doing it that it wasn’t quite right, but couldn’t find the relevant page in the manual while I had the ‘Save’ dialogue box open! The idea of saving the complex note-allocations so they can be called up on request and shared with others is an excellent one – and the format of the text file wasn’t that difficult once I understood what the 5 elements of each line were.

I could have emphasised more the fact that the program can accept multiple MIDI keyboard inputs, and also has a feature for mapping mice, joysticks, etc. I’ll certainly continue using it to experiment with other layouts (The AXiS uses the Harmonic layout, I think, which I haven’t yet tried) and other input devices.

If you do make any revisions, and I appear not to have noticed, don’t hesitate to draw them to my attention, as I’ll want to try them and blog about them.

Andy