The model I chose was the Cherry G84-4100. In fact, my conclusion was that what I needed would look very much like a computer keyboard, with rows of offset buttons, so I looked around and identified what I thought would be the most suitable. I bought and tested some tiny ‘tactile’ switches (cheap in bulk from China), but hadn’t at that time resolved the problem of how to get the computer to understand their output so I put them away for future use. The third requirement was that it should connect easily to the computer. I could construct it without advanced carpentry, metal work and electronic skills, or buy it off eBay. The hardware requirement was for an input keyboard capable of playing about 40 – 50 notes, like the AXiS pictured in my previous post – the keys would be in 4 or 5 rows and the rows would have to be offset, to make it easy to press keys on more than one row at the same time, and to allow diagonal movements for melodies and arpeggios.Īpart from the physical appearance, I was looking for something simple and inexpensive – i.e. This post is about the hardware (a QWERTY keyboard). This was a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation – I needed hardware with the type of output that could be interpreted by one of my software programs but I needed a software program that could deal adequately with the type of output the hardware – a two-dimensional key layout – would produce. This project came in in two halves, Hardware on the one hand, and Software on the other. My first alternative keyboard project was to create a MIDI controller in the form of an isomorphic keyboard, as described in my previous post.

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