We started this project to create a digital piano controller that fully captures the magic of playing a real instrument. Unlike guitarists who have a huge range of instruments to choose from, keyboard players today are stuck with only a few options, none of which come close to feeling like the real thing.
Over the past two years we've designed our own keyboard from the ground up, using real materials, making and testing physical prototypes at each stage of development, and refining every single detail of our design until we felt we had an instrument that captured the experience of playing a grand piano.
Today we're excited to give a look at what's been going on behind the scenes here since April. Included in this update:
- Manufacturing progress
- Feature change: removing the expression controls
- First photos of the 88-key model
- Batch 2 details
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Moving from Design to Production
Design work on the Vidal wrapped up in April, and since then we've been hard at work getting manufacturing set up.
At the outset of this project we made the decision to design and fabricate everything for the Vidal ourselves. This has allowed us to rapidly iterate improvements and directly incorporate feedback from pre-order holders. Throughout dozens of cycles of design, prototyping, testing, and feedback, we've been able to steer the development of the Vidal towards exactly what players want.
For the first batch, we’re also opting to do everything for production ourselves, too. We lease machine time with a local CNC manufacturer and design all the programs, fixtures, and processes for making the Vidal ourselves.
While this local, independent approach has enabled us to create exactly the keyboard that musicians have been asking for, it does have one downside: doing everything yourself can take a lot longer.
We initially assumed that it would take a few weeks at most to go from a completed design to having our first production model in hand, but as we started work on production engineering, it became clear that things were going to take longer than expected.
For each part that goes into the Vidal, we’ve had to go through complete development cycles to get the part working within its context in the full keyboard assembly. This process begins with CAD work, where we take the part that we've designed and create fixtures to rigidly hold stock material on the CNC machine. We then create CAM programs that tell the machine how to precisely cut the part out of stock. After we've completed all this preparatory work, we go to the CNC machine and use it to fabricate the workholding fixtures, and then run the full CAM programs to test our toolpaths and cutting feeds and speeds. There's typically quite a bit of troubleshooting involved at every step of the process, and each of these manufacturing cycles takes about a week. If we find that we need to make any changes to the part, we often have to start the cycle all over again.
The upside of CNC manufacturing is that once you have a process set up, you can quickly manufacture large quantities of parts. It's taken about three months longer than we thought it would to complete this work, but today we have a precise, efficient manufacturing process that meets our highest standards for quality. And that brings us to our next announcement.
The Batch 1 Production Model
Today we’re excited to share a first look at the 88-key model of the Batch 1 Piano Controller. Based on feedback we received from pre-order holders, we've made significant changes to nearly every aspect of the design since we first opened orders last summer. We're thrilled with where the keyboard is at today, and we can't wait to start shipping orders.
One Big Design Change: Removing the Expression Controls
As you might have noticed in the photos above, there’s one big design change we’ve made to the keyboard: we've removed the expression controls. These were the knob, pitch bend stick, and octave transpose switch which had previously sat to the left of the keys.
When we initially launched the Vidal, we designed and marketed a high-end general-purpose MIDI controller with an adjustable action that players could change to suit their own playing style. However, as pre-orders started to roll in, we consistently heard one point of feedback from almost everyone who had placed an order: adjustability was cool, but could we adjust their keyboard so the keys felt heavy like a grand piano right out of the box?
As we dug into this feedback, it became clear that what people wanted most wasn’t an adjustable, general-purpose MIDI controller, but a purpose-designed piano controller that accurately replicated the tactile experience of playing a grand piano. To make this happen, we postponed shipping the first batch and took the keyboard back into development.
Since then we’ve lengthened the keys, added substantially more inertia to the action, completely redesigned the keyframe, and significantly improved the feel of the Vidal in nearly every way.
One of the last outstanding design considerations was whether to keep the expression controls. While including these controls made sense for a general-purpose MIDI controller where a player would be switching between playing synths, strings, and keyboards in their DAW, it made less sense for a dedicated piano controller where players would most often be using the Vidal with piano software like Pianoteq or Keyscape. In these cases, having extra controls would detract from the experience in a small but meaningful way. For a dedicated piano controller, the one thing that matters above everything else is the feel of the keys themselves.
This was a tough design decision, and we went back and forth on it for months. Ultimately, we decided that we would rather focus this product in on doing one thing extraordinarily well, and let musicians add any extra controls they'd want through third-party peripherals. By trying to add in just a few extra features, we'd likely be detracting more than we'd add. We'd also be locking everyone into this design decision, rather than letting people create the keyboard setup that best fit their own music making.
By distilling the Vidal down to its simplest essence, we felt we could create a more effective instrument in the end.
The Path Ahead
As of today, we’re just a few weeks away from the first orders arriving in customers’ hands. We are incredibly excited about how the Vidal turned out, and we can’t wait to hear the music that people will make with it.
We're now opening in-person demos at our workshop in Philly. To schedule a demo, please contact us directly. Availability is limited, and demos are by appointment only.
When Batch 2 Orders Will Open
Along with beginning full-scale production, we’ll also soon be opening sales for Batch 2.
Batch 2 orders are anticipated to start shipping this winter, and we’re keeping the size of this batch small to give us a bit of breathing room as we focus on manufacturing. There will only be 10 spots available, and once all of these are claimed we’ll be closing sales again for a while.
All keyboards will ship out in the order that they were received, and everyone who has a pre-order today has a guaranteed spot in our production queue. Our top priority right now is making and shipping all Batch 1 orders.
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Thank You
We are incredibly grateful to everyone who has been supporting us on this journey. Whether you've just been following along or have placed a pre-order yourself, we could not do this without you. Keyboard players deserve better instruments, and we want to make a change in the music industry to bring this into reality. To our pre-order holders in particular: thank you for supporting this project and for believing in it. You are the ones who have made this possible.
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