Make your transition into this: it’s the intersection of a love of custom DIY USB keyboards, computers and mobile devices, turntables, and vinyl mixing. Yamamoto Shunichi shares their creation, C4NDY KeyVLM, an ortholinear-layout keyboard for combining mobile digital and vinyl sets.
The concept: “The C4NDY KeyVLM is a USB keyboard with a 65-key Ortholinear layout. Its greatest feature is that it can be connected to a turntable, allowing you to mix the music you are playing on your computer or smartphone with the music on your vinyl records.” That is a great feature. I’m in. Japan’s DIY keyboard scene has been all over these creations lately (more on that soon as I gather information) – makes me want to head over to Tokyo again to check these in person.
If you didn’t quite get the concept, here’s a rough video showing it in action:
And if you like this idea, you can join in the project and make your own. The GitHub is a little messy, warns Yamamoto-san, but it’s just freshly opened to the project and the plan is to maintain it on an ongoing basis:
It is not yet organized as it has only been open to the public for a short time, but we plan to maintain it in the future.
https://github.com/yamamo2shun1/C4NDY
That opens up other ideas, Yamamoto-san says:
“Some may want to enhance it as an audio interface; some may want to incorporate effects. For me, it’s boring to only type keys just because it’s a keyboard. I wanted to create a product that was a jumble of my favorite things, like mixing music.”
It looks wonderful. The DIY keyboard community is a natural fit for music since components are readily available, modular, and easy to understand and code. So watch this space.
More images:
