Ode For Ada
Ada is the cat you see in the movie. She’s 14 years old and I thought she deserved a song!
All my cats have had palindrome names: Anna, Otto and Ada.
(click the image to watch the movie)
I have cannibalized a M-Audio Keystation 61es, rearranging keys following a White Black White Black White pattern suitable for any tuning system multiple of 5 EDO or for Carlos Alpha (thought of as a 15 note scale repeating every 1169.925 cents).
I followed instructions given by Keenan Pepper on this video.
From that video things seem simpler than they really are but I managed to do it anyway.
When it was time to put keys back, following the new layout, I quickly realized I would need lots of extra keys to do it.
A regular 61 keys (5 octaves) keyboard has 36 (7*5+1) white keys and 25 (5*5) black ones but my layout in 15EDO would need 37 (9*4+1) white keys and 24 (6*4) black ones.
A 15EDO layout with 8 white and 7 black keys per octave would need 33 white and 28 black keys.
The biggest problem is that each one of the 7 white keys of a regular keyboard has a slightly different shape and when you try to reassemble them, not following the usual order, you end up in trouble. If you look at the keyboard in the video you see that the top portion of it is messed up and in order to have the rest of it usable I had to sand a few keys.
The idea would be to buy second hand keyboards (even broken ones would be OK), dismantle them and use the keys to build one keyboard with an alternative note layout.