A sad story: the Quartal Board -- the LinnStrument that almost was (sorta)
Posted: Wed Sep 18, 2019 8:05 pm
As I type this, I am watching the final 2 days of a Kickstarter campaign that may be one of the most phenomenal failures in the history of the website. With 45 hours to go and with a $30,000 goal, the creator has received one backing pledge for a total of $1. Ouch.
Why am I discussing this in the LinnStrument forum? Because based on the information I’ve been able to glean about it, it’s the story of someone who developed a grid instrument based on a layout like the LinnStrument's, but did so in isolation and never knew that the outside world was already enjoying a fully realized commercially available instrument like his.
Long story short: the campaign’s creator, Geary Thompson, is a musician who’s been making music since 1974 on something he calls the Quartal Board. He’s developed pedagogy for it and even patented it, but apparently (I have not researched this) the patent either ran out or the registration was never fully funded, and the idea fell into the public domain, assuming it was ever patentable in the first place. He’s now nearly 80 years old and figures he has maybe five years of creative life left in him, and launched the Kickstarter in a desperate attempt to get SOMEONE interested in his idea. All he was offering were caps and hoodies for ridiculous prices, and there’s no indication of what he was going to do with the money he raised, aside from potentially developing a sellable hardware device from the one handmade unit he owns.
What’s killing me about this is that apparently the magical new device he’s been developing in isolation over the last 45 years is basically a 9x9 grid tuned in fourths. He appears completely unaware of the existence of the LinnStrument, the monome, the Launchpad Pro, the Push2, the Deluge, the Medusa, and of all the people who are now playing them as an alternative to conventional keyboard technique, which is what he was hoping to encourage in the first place.
On the one hand, ha ha, look at that guy developing something we already have by the thousands.
On the other hand, ouch, 79 years old, he’s already won his battle for his method’s recognition, and he doesn’t even know it.
Here’s the link to the campaign. I have reached out to him with my email address; I’d like to learn more of his story than is available here or at his website http://www.quartalquorp.com
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/16 ... n-and-play
Food for thought...
mike
Why am I discussing this in the LinnStrument forum? Because based on the information I’ve been able to glean about it, it’s the story of someone who developed a grid instrument based on a layout like the LinnStrument's, but did so in isolation and never knew that the outside world was already enjoying a fully realized commercially available instrument like his.
Long story short: the campaign’s creator, Geary Thompson, is a musician who’s been making music since 1974 on something he calls the Quartal Board. He’s developed pedagogy for it and even patented it, but apparently (I have not researched this) the patent either ran out or the registration was never fully funded, and the idea fell into the public domain, assuming it was ever patentable in the first place. He’s now nearly 80 years old and figures he has maybe five years of creative life left in him, and launched the Kickstarter in a desperate attempt to get SOMEONE interested in his idea. All he was offering were caps and hoodies for ridiculous prices, and there’s no indication of what he was going to do with the money he raised, aside from potentially developing a sellable hardware device from the one handmade unit he owns.
What’s killing me about this is that apparently the magical new device he’s been developing in isolation over the last 45 years is basically a 9x9 grid tuned in fourths. He appears completely unaware of the existence of the LinnStrument, the monome, the Launchpad Pro, the Push2, the Deluge, the Medusa, and of all the people who are now playing them as an alternative to conventional keyboard technique, which is what he was hoping to encourage in the first place.
On the one hand, ha ha, look at that guy developing something we already have by the thousands.
On the other hand, ouch, 79 years old, he’s already won his battle for his method’s recognition, and he doesn’t even know it.
Here’s the link to the campaign. I have reached out to him with my email address; I’d like to learn more of his story than is available here or at his website http://www.quartalquorp.com
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/16 ... n-and-play
Food for thought...
mike