I fiddled with the piano for a few years starting in high school. Could play some Bach but never felt like it was natural. At the start of lockdown I bought a guitar and tuned it in perfect fourths and it was like a whole world of applying theory was blown open. All I need to do is move my hand up or down a fret and that changes the root of the mode? I don't need to get accustomed to a mode as a specific permutation of black and white keys?
It's like an order of magnitude less complex. It's tough to fully voice intricate chords by myself, but it's more than worth it for a flat grid of notes instead of the hellish terrain of the piano.
Maybe if the Lumatone gets an affordable version I'll pick that up.
(Or I could just get a keyboard that shifts around on the firmware level so I can play any diatonic mode on the white keys... does anyone else do that? I guess that would still make it really annoying to modulate mid-performance.)
midi makes everything easy. And if you use ableton or whatever they have a "midi effect" plugin that can transpose your midi, so you can record it in standard and then change the notes "post-tape" that way when you play f on your keyboard it's still f in the piano roll instead of like g if you transposed up a whole step or whatever from the keyboard itself.