Just thought I’d make a little post here noting that I made a little improvisation on the Striso to demo it for some friends online, and put it on my YouTube channel:
The new firmware removed all the issues I was having with velocity sensitivity before (seemed capped at 50%, and fixing it in software kinda worked, but seemed to lose a lot of resolution), and also made it easy to fix a last remaining issue where one key was still double triggering on occasion, and now it’s basically perfect, and so fun to play.
This is in 31edo, using a patch for Surge originally due to Roger Linn that I tweaked a bunch. Can’t get enough of those septimal minor thirds.
Thanks for sharing and welcome to the forum! Nice playing and a lovely first person point of view
Have you tried the free transpose function by any chance? I’m curious what people think of this as way to transpose to the notes of 31tet that are not in the 17 notes per octave on the Striso.
I got my Striso back in 2021, but if I’m honest, I haven’t played it nearly so much until just the last couple weeks since I installed the newest firmware on it and realized that it was performing a whole lot better than any previous time I’d tried it. I also have a Lumatone though, which I got in 2020, and have been playing music on that in mostly Wicki-Hayden layouts since then. Obtaining my Lumatone was pretty much the real start of my latest journey into playing music. (I did play clarinet in highschool over a couple decades ago.) Just before deciding to get a Lumatone, I’d started trying to learn the piano keyboard again, and within a week got very frustrated with its asymmetry making it needlessly difficult to build muscle memory. I’d learn to play some musical object that I liked, and then want to transpose it somewhere in context and would realize that I’d have to work out how to move my fingers all over again. I woke up one morning with the idea that if the keyboard was a grid of uniform intervals, it would be far easier to learn (my first idea was essentially the Tonnetz, though I later came to prefer Wicki-Hayden for various reasons). Of course, that idea was too good to be just my idea, and so searching online quickly led me down this rabbithole of isomorphic keyboards and microtonality.
So I dunno, I’ve been playing Wicki-Hayden keyboards for maybe an hour or two every day for the last 3 or so years, and essentially all of that time has been spent improvising and figuring things out for myself (I haven’t even yet gotten back into reading sheet music or learning to play specific things that I like, but eventually… )
It’s hard to believe, but I’d say that inside of a day of getting my Lumatone, I was already a more capable keyboard player than I’d ever gotten with the usual piano layout though, despite having access to a keyboard for most of my life – good enough for it to be continuously fun.
I haven’t yet tried that mode, I’ll have to look into it. One of the things I’ve thought might be nice would be to put a break in the circle of fifths and for instance, replace the flats with corresponding neutral intervals – but it’s possible also just to bend to those notes if I’m trying to be bluesy.
thanks for the detailed reply! Very good playing indeed. I hope to get to that level… I used to play trombone and guitar and I too like the way the Striso is symmetrical. Had the same issue with piano layout that you mention…
