The Weird Keyboard That Transcends Keys

Photos by the author.

On a rainy afternoon last week, I wandered into a giant cave in the middle of New York's Lower East Side. Actually, it's a recording studio called "The Space," but between its decayed unfinished brick walls, underneath its 60 foot ceiling—and aside from a hefty spread of cheese and veggies—the vibes were downright cavernous. I'd come to see and play a new species of musical instrument made by Roli, called "The Seaboard." Lined up with a few other types of keyboard instruments in evolutionary progression, the Seaboard sat—the apex.

Roland Lamb, the Seaboard's inventor was chilling there with three other people in a semi-circle when I dug my fingers into the Seaboard. And they watched as I was utterly dumbfounded. Even though I've played the piano for 16 years, I felt like a fish out of water, like this instrument was created solely to invert my world view. The Seaboard Grand's 88 keys, or keywaves—or siliconized hot dog halves—sank beneath my fingers to express every last impression and recoil I made. Selling for $8,888.88, I resolved to learn and play the Seaboard like it was the only time I'd ever touch or see one.

"So, Daniel, how does it feel?" Roland and his smiling team interrogated.

"Weird," I must have said a hundred times. It reminded me of shopping for piano rentals as a child with my parents. Because at that moment, I really didn't want to do the journalist-aficionadoey thing. What I really wanted to do was be alone with the Seaboard for a week, getting to the point where I could reasonably play it.

The keys, which Roland calls "keywaves," are basically the texture of low-density stressballs. When you push into their goo-filled membranes, you're controlling a number of parameters, depending on which parameters you've assigned them to obey. If you roll your finger between notes, you hear microtones, pitches between the notes' Western-established pitches. No gaps between keys, no gaps between tones. The feeling of the surface was so interesting, and at the same time so awkward, that when I tried to play the pieces I've played for years, that are locked deep in my muscle memory, I would mostly fail.

Similar to playing a fretless guitar or bass for the first time, the Seaboard boggled my mind somewhere deep in the subconscious—the part of me that's spent 16 years feeling out the notes and action. The ridges and gaps hint at a typical keyboard, an engrained chromatic geography, if you will, but the Seaboard just isn't one. The motorskills that hours of practice embedded deep into my brain needed an update.

So, I was in no way capable of succinctly answering a question like "how does it feel?", because I was too busy trying to reconcile the total awkwardness of touching this thing for the first time. A demo 'seaboardist,' eventually took the helm and played a jazzy tune, and then demonstrated how utilizing the Seaboard's ability to pitch-bend every note could give you a convincing ersatz jazz bass. He eventually sat with me Heart & Soul style, which I tend to abhor because one party is almost always being patronized.

Like the impressions on sunburnt skin fading back to red, this keyboard is as much a living thing as it gets. The black and white rigidity of a piano's keys might perfectly contrast the grey matter that the Seaboard sets out to be—an ocean of ticklish nerve endings.

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Eventually, Seth Haley aka Com Truise, showed up to try out the Seaboard, and I watched him as he sized up the instrument and then sat down to try and play it. The ex-art director turned 80s-synth electronic producer reacted with a similarly compelled, awkward excitement.

I hung around until some of the Roli team took off to get more provisions for an event they were having. As I played the Seaboard more, I got a little more acquainted with it, but realized it would take great efforts, and many weeks until I'd be satisfied with playing it in front of another soul.

As a pianist, there's an urgency to be able to play keyboards well, and with ease, because, really, they're never really harder to play than an actual piano. At least for myself, the range of dynamism will always be much greater on a piano than a keyboard, and always has been. But that's exactly why Roland Lamb invented the Seaboard: The piano wasn't doing enough for him. It wasn't expressing as much as he felt it could. He was frustrated by its limitations.

On the edge of a musical frontier, looking to reinvent a wheel that's been reinvented a thousand times, it looks like this guy might be on to something, even if the product is incredibly expensive due to being handmade in London. But I'm sure plenty of people will fork out the cash for it. "Has Phillip Glass fucked with this yet?" I asked the Roli rep, Evan. "He lives up the street, you should hit him up."

Daniel is on Twitter - @DanStuckey.

This piece originally appeared on Motherboard which is all about the intersection of technology, science and humans!