Wednesday, April 06, 2011

Is The Key The Little Key?



How long the night
How cold the thought
Of living without you
Now that we’ve touched

How long the night
How cold the thought


from “End of the World Things”



Today’s post is a kind of mish-mash.

I’d intended to have something special to go along with that lyric above, but that never happened exactly as I’d intended. It will happen at some point in the future. I didn’t want to rush it.

I’ve got music and other stuff to go along with the bit of verse, but it is taking time to get together.

Anyway.

So, in its place is a generally unrelated bit of content that is kind of random, but, nonetheless, stuff that’s on my mind a lot.

Hell. It’s just my blog.


*


“Forgive me. A fallen horse
in Piccadilly caused a terrible congestion.
How the traffic will flow
when it is all motorized.”


That’s actor Telly Savalas as the villain in one of my all-time favorite movies, “The Assassination Bureau.”

He’s arriving late for a meeting with some businessmen. It’s early in the twentieth century and he is a forward-thinking man, a man of progress, a man who believes in sound management principles. Like I said, he’s the villain of the movie. He will be killed at the end by the hero of the movie at the climax of a fight in a dirigible. [!]

Anyway, I’ve always liked the joke that some people surely must have thought that mechanical cars would create less fuss than horses.

Ha!

Anyway, again, by way of an entirely random jump of thoughts, I’ve often wondered if inventions we think will have a great impact on the future won’t have such a great impact, and inventions we hardly give a second thought to might end up, in fact, having a large impact.



That’s a picture of a Korg “MicroStation.” It’s a little music workstation that does almost everything a big music workstation can do. Korg has a whole line of products with the “micro” prefix. One of them, the MicroKorg, is already one of the most successful keyboard products ever made.

I wonder about those little keys.

I don’t own any Korg products, but I’ve talked about the MicroKorg XL a long time ago, in Video Cuddles Gently Weeping. Those little keys are interesting to me.

At some blogs, some people have said very mean things about Korg and those little microkeys. But I wonder if those people have every actually played them?

I have played microkeys in stores and they are, in fact, reasonably easy to play. Korg researched the proportions of the widths of the keys very carefully. Scales and chords—even those involving half-step intervals where you have to plays keys right next to each other—are in practice pretty easy to play.

For a person who is a good typist and used to even smaller keyboards, the microkeys are an easy size to adjust to.

I wonder about the future of Korg’s microkeys.

I suspect—not strongly, but I suspect—many years from now small, wildly powerful keyboard devices controlled by microkeys might be all the rage and people might look back at us, now, and wonder if we were all excited by those amazing little keyboard designs.

Hmmm.














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