[Maciek416]

I use an all-fourths tuning on the Linnstrument and absolutely love it. As a person who approached both music theory and learning to play with their hands for the first time (after clicking around in a piano roll for years) with an all-fourths isomorphic keyboard, it removed whole categories of mental gymnastics and time sucks and let me pick up big chords and bits of jazz/rnb much quicker as a result. The benefits of being able to transpose and dance around the keyboard effortlessly without having to account for that major 3rd gap can't be overstated. You've got one unified mental model for everything and can skip directly to the good stuff. There are a number of grid instruments on the market that implement all fourths (Push, Launchpad, etc etc). If you have an iPad, Musix Pro can also act as a MIDI output (either for iPadOS instruments or for external hardware) that gives you an equivalent layout, but also many other interesting layouts that may work better for the music you want to play.

As a side note, after learning linnstrument, I picked up an 8 string guitar and found it much easier to translate my knowledge by tuning in all-fourths. With all-fourths, you really can learn chords as a set of (essentially) 2D glyphs that interact and fit together like Lego pieces. Inversions are easier to remember, transposition is always effortless, training your hands is quicker. Highly recommended.

[thrtythreeforty]

How do you find what you're looking for in the grid of notes on a Linnstrument? I've been looking at MPE controllers and I (currently) want a Seaboard because I feel like the note positioning knowledge will transfer from keyboard.

[Maciek416]

Hi, sorry for the late reply but hopefully you'll see this: Linnstrument lights the keyboard up so that you see where C is at for each octave. It also lights up notes similar to a piano's black/white keys. It took a little while to get situated, but I got used to this. Note that each row of a Linnstrument is like a flattened piano roll. This page might be helpful: https://www.rogerlinndesign.com/support/support-linnstrument...

Additionally, Linnstrument, like all other grid instruments that implement all-fourths or a closely-related layout, has redundancy of notes on the board. That is to say, the same note often appears at least a couple times on the board. There's a setting (default on older firmware, easy to activate on newer firmware) where you can tell the board to light up ALL other redundant individuals of a note that's currently being played. For example, when I play C3, I will see C3 lit up all over the board simultaneously. This has a huge training wheel effect both in letting you witness the shape of your tetris-tile chords elsewhere on the board, but also, always gives you a sense of the geography of the board -- where you can jump to next if you want to dance your way up/down or to another chord or note.