Melodic minor keyboard

viz

Found a little toy piano in a charity shop last weekend and modified it so that instead of being arranged around diatonic music, tuned to C Ionian and A Aeolian, it's arranged around melodic minor ascending, in A minor (or C lydian augmented. Or D acoustic - so you can play the Simpsons tune using just white notes). Just for a bit of fun.

viz

Phil_aka_Pip

wowsers!

viz

thanks!! - I have plans for harmonic minor, persian and the hungarian major and minor, but the augmented 2nds are going to be tricky! I'm also going to have a go at the lovely neapolitan major family.

http://i865.photobucket.com/albums/ab217/Vizzage/Mobile Uploads/image_zps2c492447.jpg

Phil_aka_Pip

question: I can see why you'd want two black notes next to each other (D# = Eb in equal temperament tuning but not necessarily so in other tunings), but why continue the black to the front edge of the white notes?

viz

It's a toss-up between having equal size white notes like the one above, or black notes that don't extend. If the black notes don't extend, the white notes either side of the augmented 2nd have to be like paddles. I've tried both and I think this is better, plus your hand has to hop over the augmented 2nds, which I quite like. Re tuning, it's still 12-TET by the way, just that the scales have semitones, tones and augmented 2nds. And yes, you're quite right, the scales have to have combinations of sharps and flats (or sharps and super sharps), so it would need a whole new musical notation. Even the melodic minor keyboard does; as the black notes are arranged 1-4-1-4 rather than 2-3-2-3, some transpositions of the scales have double and even treble sharps.

Phil_aka_Pip

Thanks viz I'll try to get my head round that! (It's way past whisky o'clock)

viz

Lol it was for me too, and reading it again now I'm struggling to make sense out of it!