Axis 64 Midi Controller Looks Cool and Generalizes Harmonic Structure

The Axis 64 MIDI controller mimics the note range of a standard synthesizer but has a much different layout. The keys are shaped like hexagons and organized in a honeycomb fashion on a flat panel. The keys are organized so that harmonic relations between notes can be easily transposed to another key by simply moving your frame of reference. To put a sequence of notes in a different key (or more interestingly, a different mode), it is simply a task of moving to the correct starting point and playing everything the same. For those of you music composition geeks out there, this means that you can easily perform modulation and transposition without having to memorize the particulars of a scale. Though it may be initially daunting to those of us who are familiar with a standard keyboard layout, I imagine that it would be easier to learn composition on one of these if you were starting for the first time.


C-Thru Music, the makers of the Axis 64, refer to the controller as having a Natural Layout. I don't know if that is an industry standard term, but I do know that it looks. Because chords in this type of layout are independent of the root key, they can be represented as a collection of triangular cells or as combinations of the hexagonal keys (for large list of examples, look here). This makes me wonder about what would happen if you ran the Game of Life automata simulation on a hexagonal grid and then superimposed the states onto this layout. Neat.

A video demonstration of the controller can be found here.