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.)
Same. I play both piano and keyboard percussion stuff, and the set-up is so natural to me that I can just run through all 12 major keys easily. But I tried picking up banjo/guitar and man, is it a whole different ball game. It's nice to be able to just throw a capo on to modulate, but I have no idea how to go about learning different fingerings and chord structures.