The five-seven color layout

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 with the regular keyboard and thus help them to get started. But that didn't turn out to be the case. Instead, many people simply found it confusing.

In fact, I see the following disadvantages of the classical layout:

• Messy and visually overwhelming: Switching between dark and bright almost every key, there is just too much visual information and it's pretty hard to quickly find a stable reference point without putting some energy into it.

• Different appearance from different angles: Depending on from where one looks (or puts a camera) the layout looks different. A bird-eye view from the top seems to reveal a different structure than looking from the side.

• Bias towards the bright keys: I often found myself improvising in C major / A minor, because it's so easy and tempting to just follow the bright keys. Switching to other keys is more difficult. As a result, one basically looses the nice isomorphic property of the layout.

• Dark keys appear like "holes": From some perspectives it looks as if the dark keys were simply missing. This also affects the playability. While transposing to other keys should be trivial on an isomorphic keyboard, with the classical layout it actually is not. There is the tendency to stumble over dark keys.

• Octaves are not so clearly visible: While the classical layout does enable one to find notes quickly, still, when just looking at the keys for a very short moment, one doesn't immediately see the periodicity of the notes, i.e., their repetition after one octave.

All these problems led me to resuming my experiments with different color layouts.

I definitely wanted to avoid the change between dark and bright every semitone, so I was focusing on block-based layouts: A block of several neighboring keys with the same color followed by another block of keys with another color. This setting led to the following questions:

1. How many blocks?

2. How many colors?

3. How many keys per block?

To answer these questions, I was applying three criteria:

1. Visual simplicity

2. Simplicity to find each note

3. No bias towards any key

After letting the impressions of the different layouts sink in, I felt that more than two colors was already visually too complex. I didn't want to use a color layout that already stresses me when only looking at it. So I settled for two colors and two blocks. Two alternatives remained: The six-six layout (six dark keys, C-F, and six bright keys, F#-B) and the five-seven layout (five dark keys, C-E, and six seven bright keys, F-B).

The six-six layout was very symmetrical, which was actually pretty nice for completely freeing oneself from any bias towards a key and minimizing the number of visual patterns, thus really celebrating the isomorphic nature of the layout. However, its great symmetry turned out to be a major problem for orientation and finding where each note is.

The five-seven layout, on the other hand, by not being so radical, kept some structure of the classical piano that really helps for orientation: One still has the familiar blocks C,D,E (separated by wholetones), and F,G,A,B (again separated by wholetones).

This structure allows to reuse one's pattern recognition from the classical piano to know where each note is. In contrast to the six-six layout, the five-seven layout also clearly distinguishes between the rows 1/3 and 2/4 because it has different number of dark/bright keys per row. This breaking of symmetry again helps to know where one is.

So, here it was, the final decision. Of course, as with probably everything in life, also the choice of the color layout is a compromise. I think finding an arbitrary note with the classical layout is still a bit faster than with the five-seven and there is still a tiny bias towards certain keys. But I think it's the best compromise and this new color layout basically fixes all problems with the classical layout listed above. So all in all, I am very happy with it. I let Peter know about it and he made prototype RR Janko Keys with five-seven layout so I could test them more thoroughly.

This time I used my Midiplus X6-III keyboard as a basis which I actually like a lot. The key actions is pretty soft but it's very expressive and particularly nice for playing percussively. I connected it to my Polybrute 12 and the two together are really a killer combination!

Also after having played this layout for several months, I'm still satisfied with it - so much so that I decided to completely focus on this layout as the new standard layout for our RR Janko Keys!

In the meantime, I also retrofitted my Yamaha CP73, my first conversion of a hammer action keyboard. And it works! The CP73's keys return to their original position a bit faster than other hammer actions I've tested, which is ideal for our Janko Keys, because they add some extra weight to the keys, slowing down their upward movement.