One day my friend Panos told me "Hey, why don't you apply at the Superbooth in Berlin to show your Janko keys. They support all kind of small start-ups for musical innovations". I was pretty excited about the idea, I've never been an exhibitor before and the Janko project was still so young. I wrote an email to the organizer and not much later got an answer: They thanked me for the application, but there is a lot of demand this year and they can't promise me a spot, but they

In the meantime, I've recorded plenty of videos on the RR Janko Keyboard, had many interesting conversations about it and several people bought their own one. There was one issue, though, that many people expressed in their comments and I agreed with them: The classical layout in combination with the slim Janko keys looks pretty messy. I had experimented with different color layouts already before, but I thought that the classical layout might help people see the similarity w

The Jankó is here! While Peter and I are preparing for making this Jankó version available for many people, I've used the time to start sharing the knowledge about the Jankó piano, why its layout is the way it is, what isomorphism is, how to play chord shapes and scale fingerings, and why it might actually be a pretty nice approach to piano for guitar players. Check out the LEARN section on this website and my YouTube channel for more content: https://www.youtube.com/@rico-r

Since my first meeting with Jankó piano maker Peter Reinert, I have kept the contact with him and had a lively exchange. My girlfriend and I visited him from time to time and we've become good friends by now. I was presenting him my slim-key Jankó design and described the steps to build it. The acoustic Jankó piano that he built in the past is a masterpiece, but it's an incredibly large effort to build it and would cost quite a lot - most likely too much, especially because a

Discovering that the slim-key version of the Jankó was working so well really felt like a breakthrough! However, the previous version still had two issues: The highest row had too much resistance and one had the feeling that when pressing a key, the force was directed into the wrong direction. The keys of the lowest row were too long, exceeding the original keys by too much, they had too low resistance and too long key travel. So I started thinking about ways to solve these p