When you are used to stretching your fingers further to reach the accidentals, you would need to put them on the bottom row to achieve the same effect. The keyboard of a gurdy is set up like you were looking at a regular keyboard from the back side - if you had the tangents turned around and were pushing down on the keyslips instead of pushing up on them, the keyboard would be right.
The idea is to have the keys positions and relationships mimic more closely the nature of other keyboard instruments - the melody is right-hand and the accidentals are a stretch from the resting hand position instead of the naturals. I realize that the gurdy is not simply a keyboard instrument, and in building this instrument for this purpost it would be a 'key of C' instrument only because only in that key would the keys actually correspond to what they are on a piano keyboard (though you could transpose with it, like we do in any gurdy that can go from C/G to G/D, but that would defeat the purpose of this specialty instrument) Again, it is not a done deal, and would only be built to experiment with the effects that 'normal' keyboard playing would have on the instrument. It would not be a new instrument type, it would not have a new sound, but I know that you get a different set of subtleties when you change up hands and when you let other parts or your mind control different things (the left-hand, right brain control of the rhythm in this proposal, for example). I just think it is a neat idea to run with, mentally at least for now. I wonder why traditionalists often don't take an immediate liking to me? Chris Nogy *********** REPLY SEPARATOR *********** On 3/4/2007 at 5:34 PM [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Sounds like an interesting idea: I recall thinking about similar arrangements.... One detail puzzles me, though: why reverse the naturals & accidentals? On a 'regular' keyboard, their positions are the same as on a hg; does this have something to do with the type of action you're contemplating? -Wm. Steinmayer ************************************** AOL now offers free email to everyone. Find out more about what's free from AOL at http://www.aol.com.
