Looking for a MIDI keyboard with this feature...

Anything about hardware musical instruments.
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Saw it in a video of San Holo's, but can't remember which one. He had this MIDI controller that had the ability to change all the physical keys on the board to all the notes in a single key of your choice, so that whatever you played, it was a note in that key. Looked like an awesome feature, what do you call it/is it a particular model that does this?

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Transpose it's called. Hard to find a keyboard without it actually...

Make sure the scale of your choice sits on all the white keys, then make sure to don't touch any of the black keys. Or do the reverse for a pentatonic scale ;-)
Last edited by BertKoor on Mon Dec 03, 2018 8:28 am, edited 1 time in total.
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That feature may be included in some of the "arranger keyboards". That niche I'm not real familiar with, includes various auto-accompaniment features not considered very "hip" in pop/rock/techno/country/jazz genres. But the fancy ones are rather expensive.

Then again are various midi mapper apps been around since the dawn of midi on commodore 64 computers and such.

A mapper app would give you the feature on any midi keyboard

Again, niche apps not many users got interested in. Some fancier/smarter than others. Some such features might be in korg karma equipped keyboards I am ignorant of karma never could get interested. Back on the 1980's I wrote some real time mappers do stuff like that and sales were very modest not much apparent growth potential

Such features probably tucked away in lots of softwares as "minor options". For instance band in a box has been able to let you play any key and have it auto mapped to an appropriate scale to the current chord and key sig of the song you are playing. You can even do the trick playing auto mapped melodies from the computer asci keyboard. Feature been in there since the early 1990's but I doubt it is a heavily used feature. BIAB has so many zillion odd little features you can invoke. Keep adding features for 30 years and that happens, though it can get a little cluttered, or hard to even remember all the available features.

Mappers would be real easy to write with scripting languages included with some DAWs. I dunno all the modern options. Fer example trivially easy to write with reaper jsfx.

Please overlook any horrible typos, reply was done on Android phone and I can't type worth beans on any kind of screen keyboard.

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most likely it was a NI Kontrol

https://youtu.be/eMIIAWQirIE

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Komolete control does this.
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The otherwise dreadful Akai Advance can do it as well, through the VIP software.

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BertKoor wrote: Sun Dec 02, 2018 9:56 pm Transpose it's called. Hard to find a keyboard without it actually...

Make sure the scale of your choice sits on all the white keys, then make sure to don't touch any of the black keys. Or do the reverse for a pentatonic scale ;-)
+1

Also, even if your keyboard somehow doesn't support it, you can still do the trick with a plugin.
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Yeah but... I mean... I'm not trying to be that jerk guy. But if you learn to play you can do cool fun key-modulation stuff in real time with just your hands, the keys, and the synth. Secondary dominants, chromatic mediant modulation, all my favorite stuff to do...

It would feel like a prison to be stuck in one key.

Now I feel bad for typing this out. Obviously it's a useful tool.

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Yep depends on how harmonically complex. On one hand zillions of one chord or two chord "compositions" where a dumb mapper might somehow be useful, otoh as was mentioned, maybe just restrict the chords to Am and possibly also toss out an occasional G if you want to be the Errol Garner of techno, then just carefully noodle on the white keys.

The "only one scale" simple mapper can't even deal with a three chord typical folk song. A I, IV, V country or rock song will suffer if you are stuck with only one scale to fit over all three brain-dead chords.

There are various ways to make multi-scale mappers, either controlled by "smarts" in the program, or using some of the midi keyboard keys to latch-select different scales on the fly, or other approaches.

Tis been years but sometimes I'd play with mappers for fast lead playing for recording not live. Pre select relevant scales according to chord progression and use a mix of relative mapping and random selection. IOW repeatedly playing the same key would result in a variety of random-selected notes in the desired key, but the random selections would all be fairly close to the played key. You wouldn't get random scale-matching notes jumping around an octave or more.

So anyway the idea was to concentrate on the expressive timing of the lead and expressive use of pitch and mod wheels, and let the mapper worry about which exact notes to play. Anyway any bad random note choices could be later fixed in the piano roll editor. :)

But really maybe too much bother. You could do it just as easy playing wild finger twitching paying all attention to expressive timing and wheel gestures, then make melodic sense of it afterwards in the piano roll window.

Or even weirder, one might practice and compose a part until one can actually play it as intended but that would be rather radically old-fashioned. :)

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Thanks for the responses! Sorry if it sounded like a dumb question lol. I wasn't aware what it was called. My piano does have a transpose, but I was looking for something like what jdnz had posted. Tells you the exact key you're in, major/minor, (pretty awesome that there's a visual indicator too.)

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