Free Your Fingers!
You already know the patterns! Get a firmer hold on them. Unlock the potential and let freedom ring!
What’s a Z-Board?
It might be some sort of frottoir. It might be a cool computer keyboard. Around here it’s a new musical instrument. Here is the Z6: a six “stringed” instrument that lets musicians use both hands while applying all the familiar patterns of the string instrument fingerboard. (The ‘Z’ stands for “zebra” because from some angles the black and white keys seem to form stripes.)
Did you get it already? If not, consider this view of a guitar neck.
Then start coloring the “white” notes, that is ones in the C major scale:
And then the black notes:
Then you just remove the actual guitar, leaving the keys:
And the instrument is electronic -- that is, it sends out MIDI signals rather than generating sounds itself. That’s all there is to it!
Tunings
You might have noticed that the pattern of black and white keys isn’t quite the same in the top picture as the bottom. What’s up with that? In short: tunings! The top photo shows tuning in fourths, with the note C at the lower left. By contrast, the guitar-neck examples show a standard guitar tuning, with F at the lower left. (The actual Z-Board would also give you keys for the open strings!) You can get a Z-Board in fourths, fifths, or in standard guitar tuning (EADGBE).
Each horizontal row of keys gives you the notes from a single string of a conventional stringed instrument. The musical interval between each row (“string”) can be a perfect fourth, a perfect fifth, or the pattern can follow that of a guitar.
How Did We Get Here?
Harvey Starr builds custom MIDI controllers. Above left are some of the more conventional-looking models; to the right, something a little more inscrutable. At least the left-hand ones are sort of identifiable as guitar-like instruments. Andrew Duncan met Harvey and they collaborated on an instrument that was meant to be played with two hands.
In 1992, Andrew and Harvey (left) developed the first Z-Board. That year, Andrew (far right) introduced it to the world at the Audio Engineering Society’s 93rd Convention in San Francisco. (Here is the preprint.) Their goal was to let guitarists and other string players play notes with both hands, removing the constraints of physical strings.
There were precedents for this. Stanley Jordan and Eddie Van Halen were using the technique of hammer-ons with both hands, playing conventional string instruments in an unconventional way. Emmett Chapman developed an instrument called the Stick, meant to be played this way. In 1985 Andrew bought a Stick, and imagined a fully electronic version of the instrument.
For a decade and more, Harvey worked on improving the hardware and software, and Andrew tackled the musical literature — Beethoven sonatas and Bach fugues — that had been out of reach on conventional string instruments.
For example, here is a preliminary animation of the fingering patterns you would use to play Bach’s Prelude in C from the Well-Tempered Clavier, book I on a 12-string Z-Board:
(To be continued...)