I’ve never been much of a musical person. But my kid was playing with a toy piano the other day, pressing buttons and whatnot. I lay my fingers on the keyboard and thought “hmmm… kinda like the home row”.
So my question to the community: have any of you built musical keyboards? Did you post a blog or guide? At first I was thinking a choc switch with a custom long cap that was held off a pivot point at one end and attached to the switch at the other. But musical keyboards vary sound depending on how you press the note. So maybe Hall effect?
Anyway, keen to hear of any adventures down this road by others?
I’m a pianist, and pianists are often very particular about how musical keyboards feel. There doesn’t appear to be a very large DIY community around it. Getting a digital keyboard to feel good has a lot of elements. It seems that it’s very expensive to design and manufacture a music keyboard, let alone to do it modularly as the keyboard community has. I would expect it to require a lot of compromises that I wouldn’t be willing to deal with except as a hobby project.
Synths, on the other hand, have a HUGE DIY community and that sometimes extends to making keyboards. But for me, it rarely seems worth it to fabricate a keyboard when a MIDI controller with MIDI cables or MIDI over USB can be had as cheaply as $50 or to have a really well done one for under $150.
I’d be more interested in modding an existing keyboard than I would creating my own from scratch.
I found this list of links related to diy instrument and synth making in case you’re interested. https://sdiy.info/wiki/Online_resources
This is such a niche topic that you should probably seek out a traditional forum. Also, check out Look Mum No Computer for some inspiration.
Having it feel exactly how you want and being able to use something you built yourself is a big part of the mechanical keyboard community.
I can definitely see it for MIDI controllers, but a piano has that smooth press and satisfying bottom-out that I don’t think is possible to replicate easily. You also need to sense how hard the key is pressed and the only way keyboard switches could sense that is with something like hall effect and a polling rate that is high enough to detect how fast the key is pressed down.
The most common way to sense velocity is to have two switches at different levels and calculate the delta to see how fast it moves between them. This does require precision, though.
- the Planck has a tiny built in speaker for music mode
- the creator of hexagonal keycaps also made the 0x33 midi controller keyboard
- QMK has MIDI functionality
You should check out Melodicade MX
https://www.koopinstruments.com/instrument-projects/melodicade-mx
Getting it to make a sound is (probably) easy but realistically emulating piano action would be really hard. Reputable electronic pianos all mimic real piano mechanics to a degree, e.g., the visible portion of an individual key is only a fraction of its entire length in order to give you the “weight” and “speed” of the real key action, which would be hard to reproduce with e.g. a shorter key + spring. A search of “hammer actions” should give you some idea
Hey all,
Thanks for the great feedback. As I say, I’m not a musician, so much of the feedback is likely obvious to a pianist, but not to me. It sounds like this might be a non-starter. At least for me.
I haven’t built a musical keyboard, but I’ve taken apart a home (electric) organ or two. I hear that one among the many options you have if a modern pipe organ is being made for you, is different strengths of magnets that initially impede your keypresses, like the pneumatic valves would if it weren’t electronically controlled; as well as different woods for your keys. There’s a channel on YouTube to which I’m subscribed where the guy is building his own tiny pipe organ (like, 30 pipes, the size of a large suitcase).
The hexagonal key layout mentioned by others, and also often seen on one side of an accordion, is one among several alternative musical keyboard layouts: the white and black keys are sort of a musical QWERTY. Not the best, but the largest installed base, the most likely for new people to learn, and the most likely to be attached to an arbitrary keyboard instrument you come upon.
Both my in-laws are pianists and we’ve talked about this before - the consensus was that the mechanisms for typing keyboards and musical keyboards are very different. With a (good) musical keyboard, you don’t just care if a switch was pressed, you also care about how quickly and forcefully it was pressed - this can significantly impact the volume, pitch and tone of a note.
High end electric keyboards go as far as simulating resonances between different strings - vibration in one string can induce vibration in its neighbours depending on the exact frequencies, the geometry of the instrument, the materials it’s made from etc etc.
Instruments like a piano have existed for more than a century, and very well financed people have spent a lot of time and energy optimising every single part - if you think mech key people get pedantic about things like what material the plate is made out of and how it’s mounted, go talk to a high end musician - they make us look super relaxed
isn’t a mechanical music keyboard just a piano?
