Interesting product, really terrible website. I know the rolling page layouts are popular these days, but in this case it just looks bad. Lots of transparency around text, which makes some of it hard to read or focus on. The navigation at the top left should always display all the sections (I shouldn't have to mouse over the little cubes to reveal what they are). When the nav text for "technology" passes over the blu…
A new type of piano keyboard: The Seaboard
41–50 of 80 posts
Re: A new type of piano keyboard: The Seaboard
#42Why all this negativity? I think it looks awesome and I want to buy one right now.
Re: A new type of piano keyboard: The Seaboard
#43Seen this one a couple days ago and I honestly can't understand what the hype is all about. I've been playing the piano for 11 years now and I can't see myself or any classical pianist using this product. I'm aware that this is most likely not intended for classical musicians but still, I fail to see the reason to change the design of an instrument that's been around for a very long time in one form or another. Chang…
I agree with the poster who said "this isn't for you." Then again, it's not for many people. Electronic instruments have only changed the basic design slightly because they are tied down by a short-sighted standard. It's why mod wheels have been around forever but these things haven't. See the post at the top about the MIDI spec and such.
Re: A new type of piano keyboard: The Seaboard
#44Why all this negativity? I think it looks awesome and I want to buy one right now.
The reason their product hasn't been dominating the market for the past 20 years is not because they were the first to dream it up (they weren't, though there appear to be some incremental improvements here), it's because you can't get it to talk to the other $50k+ worth of equipment in your studio.
Re: A new type of piano keyboard: The Seaboard
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reason their product hasn't been dominating the market for the past 20 years is not because they were the first to dream it up (they weren't, though there appear to be some incremental improvements here), it's because you can't get it to talk to the other $50k+ worth of equipment in your studio.
The only piece of hardware in most studios is the computer. I don't see any problems getting it to work with my DAW and synths through USB.
How exactly do you expect to get this to work with your existing tools? It's obviously not usefully MIDI-compatible.
Re: A new type of piano keyboard: The Seaboard
#46I'm very suspicious of this and related products. The thing that's really great about all our acoustic musical instruments is that when you push on them, they push back . I don't mean this simply in the normal force sense. Consider a guitar. You've got a string which you press over a fret with your left hand. This can be naively emulated by a switch. But with the guitar, the timber and pitch change depending on how y…
The classical pipe organ, often referred to as "the king of instruments", is a synthesiser. The organ console is an electrical or pneumatic controller, with no direct connection to the pipes. Most large organs have considerable "latency", due to the distance from the console to the pipe room. Some pipes may be as much as a hundred feet away from the player, so the sound will take over 90ms to reach them - several orders of magnitude more delay than a modern computer system.
The organ is still regarded as a highly expressive instrument, in spite of the relatively modest control a player has beyond simple pitch and duration. Although most organs have many stops which provide similar timbres to existing instruments, it is understood that the organ is an instrument in its own right and should be played as such, and is not merely a tool for emulating other instruments.
The idea that an electronic instrument should imitate acoustic instruments is simply a poverty of imagination. Electronic instruments, used in a manner that is sympathetic to their natural properties, can be absolutely as expressive as any acoustic instrument. The theremin has perhaps the worst user-interface of any musical instrument as the player has no physical contact with the instrument whatsoever, but is utterly beautiful when played by a master.
The challenge for electronic musicians is that they are often both performer and instrument-maker. A monosynth of any quality can be configured in a near-infinite variety of ways, many of which were completely unforeseen by the designer. Musicians working with modular systems or DSP programming environments have a blank canvas. We do not as yet have a good theoretical framework for this task, but electronic music is extremely young - no more than ninety years old at most. We are only just beginning to scratch the surface of what is possible.
Re: A new type of piano keyboard: The Seaboard
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only piece of hardware in most studios is the computer. I don't see any problems getting it to work with my DAW and synths through USB.
That doesn't add up, unless you're counting everyone with a trial version of fruity loops on their system as having a studio. But even then, I think it's a stretch (everyone I know who does any kind of music production has at least $1k in non-computer hardware.) How exactly do you expect to get this to work with your existing tools? It's obviously not usefully MIDI-compatible.
If the instrument could really stand on its own, then compatibility isn't a problem.
Re: A new type of piano keyboard: The Seaboard
#48They've got excellent PR, but they're not doing anything particularly novel. They're advertising a solution to a long-solved part of the puzzle, but saying nothing about the really difficult bit of electronic music control - interoperability. A quick bit of synthesiser history: Traditional electronic keyboards sense how hard you hit the key with two switches, set a distance apart vertically. Measure the time between…
False. That is but one transport option for MIDI data. USB-MIDI is another, much higher bit-rate protocol.
The standard doesn't include any means of transmitting expression data other than velocity on a per-note basis.
False. MIDI provides polyphonic aftertouch as a standard (i.e. not NRPN or SysEx) message type.
If you try and send too much controller information over a channel, the timing goes to pot as you run out of bandwidth.
Again false, if you're using a more modern transport such as USB-MIDI.
A MIDI message is just a single byte
False; this tells me you haven't read the MIDI spec. This is not true of either the messages themselves (which are generally multi-byte messages) nor of the message types (which are a single nibble for the basic types, 7 bits for the controller types, and 14 bits for each of RPN and NRPN messages).
Re: A new type of piano keyboard: The Seaboard
#49I'm very suspicious of this and related products. The thing that's really great about all our acoustic musical instruments is that when you push on them, they push back . I don't mean this simply in the normal force sense. Consider a guitar. You've got a string which you press over a fret with your left hand. This can be naively emulated by a switch. But with the guitar, the timber and pitch change depending on how y…
Your argument doesn't hold water. The classical pipe organ, often referred to as "the king of instruments", is a synthesiser. The organ console is an electrical or pneumatic controller, with no direct connection to the pipes. Most large organs have considerable "latency", due to the distance from the console to the pipe room. Some pipes may be as much as a hundred feet away from the player, so the sound will take ove…
You don't even need to go as far as organs to see latency.
Low-pitched stringed instruments such as fretless/upright bass guitars have latency due to the mechanics of the strings themselves; e.g. jazz bass players have to account for this when playing. Most good jazz bass players do this unconsciously.
Polyphonic reed instruments (e.g. harmonicas, melodicas, accordions) all have this issue as well. Reeds of significant mass (i.e. lower-pitched reeds) can take tenths of a second to sound (more on older instruments).
Also: if you can feel the string in your fretting hand vibrate on a fretted instrument, you're doing it wrong. (The string does not vibrate past the fret -- that's the point of frets! If it does, you're not pressing firmly enough and you get fret buzz. Either that or your finger's on the wrong side of the fret and you're muting the sound.)