QWERTY MIDI - Beijaflor SoftwareTRY IT OUT HERE

Every now and then, when I was a child, I remember going to an electronics store<br>and opening ‘GarageBand’ on a mac computer.

One of GarageBand’s features is something called “musical typing” and involves<br>turning the computer’s QWERTY keyboard into a piano-like input device for typing<br>in notes into the software.

Many current DAWs include a similar UI and allow for basic realtime musical<br>input without external controllers.

Isomorphic Layout

I found myself wishing for a few extra features on the ‘computer MIDI’<br>implementation on the DAW I’ll mostly use. After thinking about it for a bit,<br>I realized there might be a different approach to using the computer keyboard as<br>an input device, more similar to that of instruments like the<br>Ableton Push or<br>Linnstrument.

The idea is to implement a layout similar to a string instrument, where each row<br>of keys moves up chromatically and the adjacent rows are separated by a certain<br>interval.

I used ChatGPT 5.6 to implement a prototype of this idea, which only took me<br>a couple of hours on a Thursday morning.

Basic design

Notes are laid out on the keyboard as if it was a string instrument with 4<br>strings tuned in 4ths, like a bass guitar. When you initially open the app,<br>the C key plays a “C” note, and therefore, the key mostly above it plays an<br>“F” (the D key), and the key diagonally across but up 2 rows plays an octave<br>(the T key).

space bar presses the sustain pedal

up/down arrows trigger pitch bend

left/right arrows switch octaves

The center key can be changed.

Latching

There’s also a “latching sustain” option, where pressing either Shift keys<br>will cause pressed keys to be latched as they are pressed, but other keys after<br>the latch operation aren’t latched.

This allows you to latch synth pad on the lower range and then play a melody on<br>top. It also gets a bit around some issues pressing many keys on a membrane<br>keyboard

MIDI channels

Pressing keys F1 through F4 will switch the MIDI channel. The monitoring<br>synth will also switch patches.

Other related work

Later I found that this has been previously experimented with, although I<br>didn’t find equivalent software implementations<br>(“Don’t Forget the Laptop: Using Native Input Capabilities for Expressive Musical Control”).

There are several ideas mentioned in this article I want to play around with,<br>like using the trackpad, motion sensors or the lid sensor.

Wavetable synth

I also had a few chat sessions with Codex to build a wavetable synth which can<br>be used for monitoring.

The synth is a 2 oscillator wavetable synth and includes some modulation<br>capabilities and enough functionality to have a bit of fun without firing-up a<br>DAW.

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