[sdiy] Synth Keybards and Number of Keys

[Jay Vaughan]

>Something that puzzles me every now and then is the question of why so
>many synthesizers have been designed with less than eighty-eight keys.

Cost of parts, plain and simple.  There are only a few OEM's of 
piano-keys (Fatar, Yamaha, etc.) and unless you buy in large bulk, 
you won't see the economies of scale required to turn a profit on the 
keyboard; the piano-keys part alone is a huge percentage of the total 
cost of the average synth.

>Going from a piano to a synth keyboard with only five octaves can be
>quite frustrating, but I see that many synths have even fewer than
>five octaves.  Organs, on the other hand, have even more keys to play
>with.  Given that synths could use far more keys, to divide the keys
>up into regions of different sounds, and, or, a truly usable range of
>frequencies, on two or three levels of keyboards (manuals?), plus
>pedals, why do 88-key keyboards, seem to be somewhat of a rarity, and
>organ-style keyboards almost unheard of?  One would think that synths
>keyboards would have begun taking on more of the appearance of mighty
>Wurlitzers, with all sorts of additional knobs and switches, by now.
>


Its a pure costs thing.  Most synths that you can buy on the market 
today, still surviving the onslaught of software-synthesis and 
PC-based DSP, have extremely tight profit margins.  The markup on 
your average synth is quite heavy as well; with something like 4 or 5 
different tiers to pass through, synth production and price are 
managed with a very tight scale of economy.

Organs, generally, have a much more targetted market willing to pay a 
higher cost for the item, which typically will be installed, rather 
prestige-like, and the 'idea of higher cost' for such an item is 
certainly more than for the consumerist-like approach in the synth 
market.

>Getting to the SDIY angle of this post, how many here typically use
>more than one keyboard at a time with their SDIY projects, or retrofit
>organs with more than 88 keys for synths?
>

I'd personally like to see someone DIY a piano-keyboard with naught 
but a wireless-LAN connection, so I can use it to write software for 
the Nintendo DS, but hey .. ;)

-- 

;

Jay Vaughan