[Toutouxc]

What I like about Dodeka is not their notation, but the Dodeka keyboard.

I'm learning to play the piano now and the amount of stupid unnecessary complexity stemming from the fact that we've designed the keyboard to make playing in a single specific key easier and fuck everything else, is hurting my programmer brain.

That, and the fact that small-handed male players like me (and like 80 % of women) are gate-kept forever from a significant portion of music, just because.

It's a shame that our most versatile instrument is actually not that versatile. We could do better as a humanity.

[stephen_g]

Would their keyboard really be better for hand size? Seems to me that unless the keys were uncomfortably narrow, it would actually require bigger hands to play big chords than on a standard piano because they’re fitting all the notes in a single row instead of two? But I’ve never seen one in real life, let alone tried to play one.

I wouldn’t say that the standard keyboard is designed the way it is to make any one key “easier”, it’s more just the result of mapping the mapping based on how our notation works, and it’s just happens to be that one key doesn’t have sharps or flats so you don’t need the black keys, so it’s easier at first… Thinking of it in the way you said is probably unhelpful.

Eventually every scale becomes as easy with muscle memory if you practice enough, but the best thing to do is to try and do scales and chords by thinking about what the intervals should be. Getting intuition for that is a killer skill, especially for playing by ear when you can hear something and your fingers instantly know where to go to play it after finding the first note.

[abhorrence]

I’m curious, which key do you think is the easiest to play on piano?

I’ve found that newer folks tend to prefer keys with fewer accidental: C, G, F, D and Bb

Whereas there is a tendency for more experienced players to prefer keys with many flats: Db, Ab, and so on…

And (appropriately for the submissions topic), I think lot of this preference comes down to the fact that we tend to learn keys like C first, because the notation is simpler and it’s easier to remember the spacing. However most of the pianists I’ve talked to who prefer the flat keys will prefer them because of “how they fit under the hand”.

[Toutouxc]

> which key do you think is the easiest to play on piano?

Sorry, "easiest" may not be the best word. C major is THE key of the piano keyboard and playing in C major is so easy because all of the non-exotic chords (sorry, I don't know the english nomenclature) are played on the same kind of keys and they have identical, predictable shapes.

On a keyboard like Dodeka, all chords in all keys have predictable shapes, because why shouldn't they? You should be able to transpose any song by simply moving your hands a little to the side, anything else is just bad UI.

[yboris]

Makes me think of the Jankó keyboard which has so many benefits I would love to get one someday.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jank%C3%B3_keyboard