Sohler Piano

[MathOfInsects]

This is kind of interesting...

 

The guy filming a gig I played this weekend tracked me down afterward to talk keyboard stuff. Even though he doesn't really play, he comes from local keyboard royalty: his mother (long-)preceded our own brother Bobedohshe as the organist for the SD Padres. He's got a few B3's and many Leslies, and so does his brother, and right as I was working up a good healthy dose of miffed whimsy that the score is, hippie non-keyboard players 6, actual working keyboard player 0, when it comes to B3s, he dropped this little tidbit: "I have one of the only three solar keyboards ever made." Yeah, OK, blah blah, solar keyboard. Then he whips out his phone to show me pictures of it.

 

Turns out it's Sohler, made by a guy named Mel Sohler. The keyboard is designed with one "black" note per two white notes, which (I realized) essentially turns the whole board into a diminished scale. The "black" notes are all minor thirds from each other. I bookmarked his youtube page to check out later (now) and share with the board.

 

He can't play, obviously, but the history and the board is pretty interesting. It sort of yields Gershwin-style dark voicings in "regular" positions.

 

Here he is talking through the board and doing a little demo:

 

[video:youtube]

 

And here he is playing a bit on it:

 

[video:youtube]

 

What do you think? Gimmick? Innovation? Yawn?

[Lady Gaia]

Wild, but I can't imagine what the thought process behind it was other than "I like smaller regular repeating groups." Being unable to confirm your location on the keyboard by feel strikes me as a particularly bad idea (not to mention a complete non-starter for the sight impaired.) The natural connection between the way music is traditionally written and the pattern of natural and sharp/flat notes helps to avoid the kind of mental mapping you'd have to do here to line up a key signature with finger placement.

 

... but fascinating! Thank you for sharing your curious find.

[David Emm]

I find myself being divided between admiration for the proof of concept working so well and the feeling that its something of a glass hammer. Several alternate controllers we've seen have struck me as a willful attempt to defy Nature more than a grand new innovation. You can teach a dog to fetch you a beer, but he'll never learn to use Twitter. Most instruments present as they do because human hands and ears work most fully within a specific realm. As a synthesist (of sorts), I especially enjoyed having a Kaoss pad in my setup for a while and I'm looking quite hard at a Roli Seaboard. In the latter case, my fascination is tempered by the time it would take to become even marginally facile with FIVE gestural options to master. I could live with specifically applying it solo, as my cello or trumpet, but that would be something of a wasteful shame, wouldn't it? I only got the best from my first workstation because I committed to its very last electron's worth of capability. (Almost, TBH.) I always seem to drag even my synth views back towards the structural discipline I got from starting with piano. So while I'd enjoy a bit of playing time on righteous experiments like this or to have a Waldorf Quantum to *sample* for just a week (!), its the mainline skills and focus that get the job done. Its a cousin to Gilda Radner's observation: "I can be distracted by love, but I eventually get horny for my creativity." Going with your main draw is usually the right choice.

[MathOfInsects]

Yes to both comments above. It's intriguing as an exercise in experimentation; it's just not clear that it's an innovation. You might as well market an alphabet with the letters in different orders, just to see how it sounds out loud. Maybe some coincidental magic might emerge, but it doesn't seem INHERENTLY magical or necessary.

 

But I'm open-minded, and admire the execution, and kind of want to wrangle an invitation to play it.