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Old October 26th, 2007
Fretsource Fretsource is offline

Playing guitar for what seems like forever.
 
Join Date: May 2006
Last Online: 6 Hours Ago 11:08 PM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 1,136


It would be less flexible, Doug, not more.
Making every piano key the same size would be a huge handicap for players. Nobody would be able to play any interval greater than a fifth with one hand - and even that might be too much of a stretch.
Making them all the same colour would lose you the instantly recogniseable pattern of natural and sharp/flat notes. Many guitarists take years to learn the notes on a guitar - the note names on a piano can be learned by anyone - in minutes rather than years, thanks to that pattern.
And the advantage of the string/ fret array on guitars (and all fretted instruments) that allows you to work with moveable patterns, wouldn't transfer to the piano, even if you laid the notes as you said. There would only be the horizontal component, not the vertical, so it would be like one super long guitar string.

In case you're interested, the layout of the keyboard stems from a time when there were no sharps and flats in music theory. When they came along one by one, starting with Bb, they were 'cut in' between the appropriate naturals in such a way that they wouldn't change the distance between them. Doing otherwise would have made the instrument unplayable for those who had spent years learning the keyboard, only to find all the notes no longer where they used to be. Eventually, all sharps/flats were included except, of course, between B-C and E-F as they were already a semitone apart. The fact that this resulted in an instantly recogniseable visual pattern was a huge and unexpected bonus.


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