Jankó keyboard for the road

Having a large Jankó midi keyboard at home is one thing. But I got so inspired by the intuitive feeling of the isomorphic layout that I also wanted to play one when being on the road. I had some good experience with the Xkey keyboard by CME. It is light, flat, and playing on it reminds me a bit of writing on a computer keyboard (even though that isn't what you would expect from a good piano controller, its playability is quite decent).

An advantage of this keyboard for building a Jankó overlay are its flat keys. On a normal piano, where the key travel is more than 10mm, the different rows of the Jankó require to be arranged in different heights so that you don't press into a hole (which is particularly important for the thumb). On the Xkey, the key travel is only around 1mm which allows to put the keys into a completely flat arrangement. This drastically simplifies the construction.

We first brought all keys to the same level (similarly to what we've done with the previous version), glued little wooden blocks in the typical whole tone arrangement, and finally glued square keys on top. This time we decided to lacquer the keys in black and white - the traditional color layout. Moreover, after noticing that four rows sometimes isn't enough to consistently play all chord shapes and scales in all keys, I decided to try out five rows this time.

Already deeply involved in the construction process, I suddenly noticed that one of the original keys was not working properly. I tried for hours to somehow fix it again (some incredibly tiny parts on the inside were broken) but eventually I had to give up. It was the B key, so I always had to play in keyalities that had at least one b (which fortunately didn't really matter on an isomorphic layout). But of course I wanted to have a fully functioning keyboard, so we decided to use this version as a wall decoration and build another one.

This time I wanted to try out a color layout I had experimented with. The classical piano layout uses white keys for the C major scale and black keys for all the b's and sharps. This inevitably favors some keyalities over others - as a kid I even thought the white keys are the harmonic ones while the black keys are dissonant. I developed a color layout that avoids this bias and appears to be more in accordance with an isomorphic layout. It also only needs two colors (I had experimented with three or more colors which I found to be visually confusing).

I realized that there was still some space between the keys of the previous five-row version so we decided to try out a six-row version this time - just like in the original layout developed by Paul von Jankó. Having so many rows was luckily possible due to the completely flat arrangement of the keys (which was, as mentioned above, possible due to the tiny key travel on the Xkey).

Verdict: It works. Kind of. The whole overlay feels a bit wobbly, especially the black keys can easily be moved to the left and right. Nevertheless it is possible to play proper music on this keyboard, it's easy to build and transport and allows you to play a Jankó keyboard when traveling.