The slim-key Jankó

The building process of the previous Jankó was a lot of fun and I was very happy with the result. Nevertheless, after playing it for a while, I noticed several problems with the key layout: For certain larger chords, some of the fingers needed to be stretched or bent quite uncomfortably leading to unergonomic hand positions.

For example, as shown in the picture, for a major seventh chord with the left hand, the middle finger needs to bent more than 90 degrees while the index finger is completely stretched.

Another problem were situations where the hand was playing a certain chord and then only one finger, say the pinky, is moved by a semitone. Due to neighboring semitones being in two different vertical rows, the pinky then could not simply be moved a little to the left or right but needs to be moved up or down quite significantly leading to a rotation of the whole hand. Again, pretty unergonomic.

The classical piano, on the other hand, often allows to move to neighboring semitones quite easily by only moving slightly to the left or right (but of course, with many exceptions).

The other problem with the previous version is its complicated and pretty delicate building process. We needed to work with 5mm wooden pieces and the additional small key plates, all in all a very fragile construction.

So I wasn't satisfied and continued thinking, exploring and experimenting. I thought it would be so nice if one could build the Jankó keys only from the 1cm wooden sticks that we had been using for construction all the time. What if one decreased the width of the keys to only 1cm instead of 2cm? That would be like only playing on black keys....

This thought made me build the above prototype, only using 1cm sticks. First, I wasn't really believing in the approach, it was more for fun, but after finishing the prototype and "playing" the keys, they felt surprisingly natural and ergonomic. My fingers were somehow feeling so at home with these keys. The left of the two prototypes was built with the idea to be able to play the thumb and the longer fingers on the same row, but this layout was pretty unpractical. The right layout, however, felt just right, with 6cm key lengths per row, where 3cm are easily accessible and 3cm lie between the two neighboring keys and can be used for stretching the fingers comfortably, for example, when playing chords.

After having made this discovery, of course I had to built another Jankó overlay. When my girlfriend saw the construction, she rolled her eyes and said "Not another prototype!" :-D But I could convince her of the approach and once more she was so kind to help me with the construction. This time it should be much easier than before. We only needed to cut the 1cm sticks to the correct length and glue them together. I designed a construction that reduced the weight of the keys by making "holes" into the part of the keys with the highest row.

We sanded and glazed the wood. This time we decided to try out a warmer coloring, not the traditional rather cold black and white coloring, but more natural brown colors.

To dry the keys we put them on the balcony and realized their striking resemblance to a Stars Wars fleet.

We were pretty happy with the result, the brown colors gave them a warm vintage look.

I find it quite unfortunate that classical pianos tend to be pretty similar, mostly in black and white. The whole scene seems to be very traditional and there seems not to be much room for variance and experimentation. In contrast, the electric guitar or synthesizer scene is much more open-minded, having various designs, colors and shapes. They are open to experiment both with look and sound. I really miss this attitude in the piano world and hope that more people will break rules and try something new in the future.

But back to the Jankó. Having finished the keys, we now had to bring the underlying basis to equal height. For this we could again use our 1cm sticks and glue them to the white keys so they would have the same height as the black keys.

Finally, we glued the Jankó keys on top, and our fifth Jankó piano overlay was complete.

Playing it was different than with the versions before. With the previous versions, I immediately knew that it was not going to be the final version, and that while they were fun to play, they couldn't seriously be treated as an alternative to the piano. This version here was a totally different story. Finally, the keys felt ergonomic, allowing fingers to be stretched comfortably for any chord and easily reaching neighboring semitones. There were only two difficulties. The first was the more confusing visual impression compared to the original Jankó. But one gets used to it. And the second was that in the beginning it was a little hard to reliably hit the thin keys, especially with the thumb. But this was just a question of practice. After all, on the classical piano, one also needs to be able to play the black keys with the thumb. Both problems were not physically unchangeable obstacles that the previous versions had, they only required practice. For me, this really felt like a breakthrough! Of course, some details could still be optimized, such as the too high resistance of the highest row, the too large height difference between rows, and the large gap between keys of the first row, but these were issues that could be fixed in the next iteration...