Teaming up with piano maker Peter Reinert

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 almost nobody knows the Jankó and even fewer are able to play it. Definitely not an approach to make it available to many people.

The advantage about my slim-key overlay approach is that it is very easy to manufacture: Simply take a 1cm thick wooden plate, a wood router, cut the keys based on the 3D computer model and glue them on top of any regular keyboard with standard dimensions. Easy.

Peter got very inspired by this idea, and we decided to team up on this project and work towards making this Jankó version available to many people. It felt so great! I have had this strong wish to not only play Jankó piano myself, but share its intuitiveness, its logical approach and its simplicity with the world.

After this inspiring meeting, I optimized the key shape by tilting the surface of the higher rows and created a 2D drawing of the key shape. He extended it to a 3D model that he could use to cut the keys with his 3D wood router. He send me the cut keys and we lacquered them, this time in classical black and white, and glued them on top of my Komplete Kontrol midi keyboard:

As described in the previous post, tilting the keys leads to improved playability of the higher rows. But the shape was still not optimal. The angle could be increased even more, row heights could be decreased and I wanted to close the large gaps between the keys of the first row. So we visited Peter again, and this time, I had prepared already various different key versions that we wanted to cut together, try them out, refine, try again, refine, ...

That day we made quite some progress, but the process went on. Over several weeks, I optimized the shape, sent him the design, he cut the keys, sent them back to me, I tested extensively and refined again.

In the meantime I was looking for the ideal (midi) keyboard that should serve as the basis to glue the keys on top. I checked out many different ones, but mostly their key travel was either too short, their resistance was too high or too low, or the difference in resistance between black and white keys was too high. Or they were simply ugly :-D

Finally, I came to a conclusion. Among all the keyboards I tested, the Komplete Kontrol A series was the best fit. It's minimalistic, elegant, and most importantly, its key travel is long enough and the resistance of black and white keys just right.

And then, finally, after many rounds of refinement, I finally found the ideal key shape! Not too high, not too low, where all rows could be played nicely. And we closed the gap between the keys of the first row.

The final version (for now) of the slim-key Jankó was born.

I was so incredibly excited to play it!

After nearly two years of research, experimentation, optimization, after several points of almost giving up, it finally was there - an excellently working Jankó piano!