11. Superbooth 2025

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 put me on the waiting list. That was already more than I expected. I thought, maybe it wouldn't work this year, but at some point in the future, we'd join the Superbooth.

Several months passed with no further message and I almost forgot about the application - until two weeks before the start of the event. All of a sudden, I got an email by the organizer asking whether we'd still be interested in participating - one of the exhibitor cancelled their spot. I got so excited! We clarified some details and then we got the final confirmation that Peter and I could be exhibitors for our RR Janko Keys at the Superbooth 2025 in Berlin!

We had less than two weeks to prepare everything. Peter spontaneously built a stand suited for placing two Janko keyboards on a table, and printed banners and flyers. My girlfriend and I printed business cards, QR codes and prepared one of my keyboards with RR Janko Keys.

Then the day came. We arrived at the venue and were really fascinated. You have to be there to get a feeling of how special the building and the surrounding park is when packed with hundreds of exhibitors of gear for (electronic) music!

On the building-up day, my friend Panos also joined and helped us with some additional audio equipment and duck tape. He is the master of improvisation! One such detail was the cord he had with him that we used for attaching printed instructions for playing chords on the Janko. It should visually become very clear that a chord has a certain shape independent of the key you are playing in.

We were in the headphones-only room which was particularly convenient because it was quiet enough to give explanations about the Janko and to not completely destroy your hearing by three days of non-stop techno from your neighboring table.

Then it started. We had no clue what to expect... But after just a short while, more and more people got attracted by our stand. Usually they slowly approached it, looked at the Janko keys and seemed to be a mix of interested and confused.

So we started to give explanations. I don't know how many times during these three exhibition days I repeated sentences such as "The Janko is isomorphic. This means that chord shapes and scale fingerings are the same in all keys. Once you've practiced a song / a musical idea in one key, you can automatically play it in all keys." Especially guitar players understood the concept pretty quickly. On the guitar they can also play a barre chord and simply move the whole shape up or down to transpose it.

I was also honored to be interviewed by Take the Fear out the Gear:

There was so much interest, so many questions, so many people trying out the Janko. In contrast to a lot of mixed and sometimes pretty rude comments on social media, the atmosphere on the Superbooth was open, friendly and inspiring. People were open to learn and try out something new. It was pure joy. We rarely had a minute to relax, all the time new people came. Luckily, Peter and I got support from Panos and my girlfriend, so sometimes we had the chance to leave our stand to have a look around and enjoy the various attractions of the Superbooth.

After three days, we were completely exhausted but extremely happy and fulfilled. We knew that this was only the beginning, but it was a great beginning, full of inspiring meetings and conversations. And the good news: We already got the confirmation to be part of next year's Superbooth 2026!