Gadgetory

this is Ross Perot with the verge it is CES 2016 and we are here talking with Roland Lam he is the CEO he is the founder and he is the inventor of the Seaboard which is really crazy looking keyboard we actually saw it I think about a year ago but now we're seeing the new one the Seaboard rise a smaller version so what was the impetus for making this like what where it kind of went into the idea well it fundamentally came from jealousy because I you know as a keyboard player like a jazz pianist and I really loved music and going out gigging and stuff but when it came up time for like the guitar solo or the sax solo I was like why can't I do that on the piano you know if you can bend all the notes and you can kind of like milk all the sound out of each note and really add depth of expression and you just can't do that on the keyboard the Seaboard has five dimensions of touch so the piano you get one dimension of touch and that was a big deal 400 years ago when the piano was invented when you say dimension like just like how hard you're hitting in there well yeah in the case of the piano it's how you strike the key okay allows you to control soft to loud like the pianoforte the name of it came from that dimension because harpsichords and organs you couldn't control that like you just turned on or off the note but in the case of the piano you could use how you would strike it so the C word can do exactly the same thing based on how you strike these key ways you have I tried that not at all so start out with by striking the key okay that I can handle exactly now after you've struck I know you're like this is amazing right I I cannot believe what I'm seeing before me after you struck you have to strike the key you can you know where you can see down here you can glide up and down like this you're able to basically glide left to right you can also control it by sliding up and down I see that the key so you break a note and you can move up and down vertically as well and what is that actually doing well this is changing the sound she's the different ways you move all changed different sound primers and actually I just I just turned it on here so you can each of these parameters or dimensions you can turn on or off so if you want to play it just like a keyboard you can but if you want to have all of these other dimensions you can turn them on and what's really great about that is like let's say if you want to play a guitar sound you it's all about bending the notes right if you play a sax ound it's more about how you press in so this is the Seaboard rise this is the you know this is what the dollars yep and it comes with a software called equator which allows you to map a lot of these different sounds to all the dimensions of touch but then just recently in December we released an app as well so you could control this seaboard vise with your laptop but also the sound engine could be in your phone it's a pretty powerful app and it's partly because we spent so many years developing the Seaboard and the 3d touch technology within the seaboard and the sound engine that we could then easily apply it to like the new 3d touch API within the iPhone if you want more videos like this not as musically inclined maybe but for got to do is about more CES news you can take it on the verge comm and subscribe to our YouTube channel and if you get like a million subscribers for this we're just gonna hire Marco make them do anything go so I'll be youtube.com slash the verge thanks