The Lumatone - learning isomorphic layouts

After my first meeting with a Jankó piano, I was fully convinced that I wanted to own and play one. But buying an isomorphic piano is almost impossible. There were basically only three options. The first one would be spending around 20.000€ for a custom made acoustic Jankó piano. The second one was an offer on Facebook by somebody selling one of the few produced Daskin keyboards. I tried to buy it but unfortunately it went to somebody else. And then there was the Lumatone.

The Lumatone is an isomorphic keyboard based on LED illuminated hexagonal keys. It is arranged slightly differently than a Jankó piano, its axes are rotated by some degrees counterclockwise. Due to this difference I was first a bit skeptical whether playing it would feel as intuitive as the Jankó. On the other hand it seemed to be a well supported and polished product. And since there was not really an alternative and I definitely wanted to play an isomorphic piano, I decided to give it a try and ordered it ( not as expensive as an acoustic Jankó piano but still a lot of money).

Three months later it finally arrived (at that time I was still used to delivery dates of three days, but that's what happens when you end up in a niche... ). The first thing I noticed was that it was definitely not a substitute for a Jankó keyboard, but it had the interesting property that you could program your own note layouts. Thus I could start exploring alternative isomorphic layouts and gain experience in their advantages and disadvantages. I also tried out different color patterns with the idea to free myself from the pull towards the C major scale that is so dominant on the classical piano.

All this experimentation was an interesting learning process but at the same time I noticed that I missed the feeling of wooden keys and the symmetry of the Jankó (the tilted axis of the Lumatone was messing with my brain). So I decided to change directions. I sold my Lumatone and continued my search for a real Jankó.