FAQs

Why are the rows of notes presented twice each?

The top two rows are for the fingers and the bottom two are for the thumbs. This is for convenience.

Are there any set fingerings for the Beanboard?

See previous answer. The Beanboard has been designed to give the player freedom of thumb undertuck. The central rationale of piano fingering has been to avoid the trap of the thumb passing under the other fingers on a black note. This one design fault is behind the thousands of hours which pianists have to put in on scale work. With Beanboard we hope to save your time. While it is hoped you will find fingerings which suit you, there is no urgency yet to prescribe what is correct and what isn't.

How can I get a Beanboard?

Send a link to your friend in Yamaha Corp and wait twenty years. Or use my .stl files to make a rapid prototype of the adaptor.

Why don't you patent Beanboard and make some money?

Even if I could patent something which in essence was invented (and patented) nearly 120 years ago, I don't think that a proprietary design stands the best chance of replacing the international standard musical keyboard which is public property. Admittedly most investors don't like dealing with unpatentable inventions but this is a deal for associations or the next generation of entrepreneurs. Ones with vision, and who got frustrated by piano as kids...

You say that most people can get relative pitch ability if they work, Some have a "gift", I feel I have the "anti-gift"

the operative condition is ... "if they work". But the intuitive instruments are designed to make work on interval awareness easy and effortless, so that the instrument becomes its own teacher. The point is that there is no cross-interference between tonalities, so that every hour you spend learning the key of C for example is also valid for C# etc.

How exactly would you like to use this kind of notation: for software programs? for "investigation" only? education? or for writing scores for players of instruments like the ones you feature?

Moves is practical for pattern exercise notation and interval awareness, and for developing improvising games (inversion, truncation, expansion etc). As such, you can use it to develop improvising software, while players can use it for training purposes. You can write a day's worth of work on the back of a cigarette packet. As for scores I am currently playing wholetone panpipes in a band and reading off a flute part. There is no way I could get a bandleader to learn how to write stuff in a special notation just for me. However, when I read dots I am mentally converting the intervals to numbers.

How do you represent chords (array of notes)?

There are two ways. A major seventh chord can be written as 4 3 4 or as 4 7 11. For the purpose of deciding which improvising scale(s) go(es) with the chord the first method is better (I have a routine for doing this which throws up surprising and interesting results). For understanding inversions and chord structure the second is better.

Perfect worlds are a bit boring, and nature likes imperfections, sources of evolution. Don't you think such a "symmetric" or "regular" keyboard could reduce creativity in some ways?

On the contrary, conventional keyboard learning depends on automating scales and passages to overcome imbalances in the design of the instrument. How do you go about removing these from your playing - once they have become second nature - in order to let your music breathe? The 6-6 revolution is for developing reflex-type responses to melodic ideas as they come into your head. You learn by biofeedback as it were. I found I could follow my ideas properly for the first time on the wholetone panpipe.

Natural Tuning - You talk about chord analysis routines can you tell me more?

It consists of a weighting table which gives points to every note in any chord or note combination according to its interval with the remaining notes. The note with the most points becomes the reference tone (RT). This usually coincides with the

tonic of a major chord
third of a minor chord
dim5 of a diminished chord

The note RT is then allotted its ET value and the rest of the chord receives cent adjustments based on proximity in the honeycomb, using another set of condition tables. The weighting table has been tested automatically to ensure there are no error messages (ambiguities). I will be happy to supply these tables to anyone who wants to write the code.

I'd really like to test a piano instrument with such an adaptor. "Good riddance f... sharp!" But I'm really not a "do-it-yourselfer".

There is a 6-6 MIDI keyboard coming out soon with many improvements which should be worth waiting for. My adaptor is only for the really impatient and slightly mad! I had fun designing it though.