Now taking pre-orders, ships
in an estimated 4–6 weeks.Pre-orders open, ships in 4–6 weeks.Cancel any time before it ships, for a full
refund.How pre-orders workHow it works →
Don't throw away your keyboard.
The RK-1 modernizes any MIDI keyboard. Plug in
the keys you already own (a controller from last week, a board from 1998, anything that sends MIDI) and it becomes a current instrument:
136 sounds, automatic pedaling, live note correction, lessons,
recording, and a speaker, out of one small box.
$199 early-adopter pre-order · $249 at
launch · ships in 4–6 weeks
No subscription. No account. No cloud.
You buy the box once, updates are free for life, and everything
except the dashboard works with no Wi-Fi at all. The dashboard
itself is served by the box to any browser on your own Wi-Fi:
an iPad on the music stand, a laptop beside you, a phone in your
pocket. All at the same time, all showing the same box, all
staying in step: change a sound on the iPad and the laptop follows a
moment later. Lessons, sounds, the piano roll and every knob.
Nothing to install, no account, no app store, no operating system it
cares about.
Those screens are remote
controls, not speakers. Everything you play comes out of the RK-1
itself, through its own speaker or its own jacks, never out of
the tablet. A screen can be across the room on mute and your playing
is unaffected, and nothing you tap on screen adds any delay, because
the live audio path never leaves the box.
RK-1 · artist's rendering, final appearance
may vary · every unit numbered & signed
<10 mskey to corrected
sound
83built-in lessons
136sounds on board
$0/mono subscription
Before you read anything else
Hear it, then decide.
The same fourteen seconds of playing, rendered twice
through the box, identical notes going in, the correction
engine switched off and then on. Six notes out of thirty-nine
moved. You are hearing the engine that ships, not an edit.
🔊These make sound. Turn your volume down first.
You are hearingAssist off, what the fingers played
0:000:14
Switch while it plays, the position does not
change, so you hear the same note both ways.
Space to play, ← → to switch.
If the
second one does not sound better to you, do not buy this. That is
the entire product in fourteen seconds, and we would rather you
found out now.
Try it yourself
Play it wrong. Hear it right.
The keyboard below is live and assist is on. Miss on
purpose and listen to what comes out. Watching is free, it stays
silent until you touch a key, and the first note fades in gently.
KEYCASSISTONFIXED0playedcorrectedoriginal
Tap the keys or drag across them
A simplified engine runs
in this page: notes outside C major move to the nearest note that
fits. The box also reads the chord you are in and how you have been
playing, on every key of the keyboard, in under 10 ms, on its own
hardware.
That was one key, in a browser tab. The box does it
on every note of every chord, on the keyboard you already own.
The part that decides whether you are still playing in six weeks
It is built to be needed less.
Correction is what makes the first evening bearable.
This is what makes the sixth week different from the first: a line
that goes down as your hands take over, drawn from every note
you have played.
Green is minutes practised. Amber is how much help you
needed, and it falls.
Sample data from a
demo unit.
Most products in this
category are built to be needed more. This one prints a report card
showing it mattering less, and hands it to your teacher.
The first question everyone asks
Will it work with your keyboard?
Type the make and model. We will tell you yes or no,
and which cable you need. Almost everything with a MIDI socket or a
USB port works, including boards from the nineties.
Not listed? Email the model and a person
will answer. If a keyboard turns out not to work, that is a full
refund and we pay the return shipping.
What it is
A modernizer for MIDI keyboards.
Almost every keyboard ever made still sends perfectly
good MIDI. What dates them is everything around the keys, the
sounds, the connections, the lack of a screen, the absence of
anything that records or teaches. The RK-1 replaces that half.
What your keyboard has
What it gains
Dated or thin built-in sounds
136 instruments, 25 of them synthesized live, nine effects
No sounds at all, a silent controller
A complete instrument with a speaker in the box
Nowhere to plug a sustain pedal
Pedaling that follows your harmony automatically
No screen, or a two-line LCD
A display on the box, and the full rack on any phone or tablet
No way to record
Every session saved as MIDI, and 30 minutes you can rewind
USB or 5-pin only
Wi-Fi, Bluetooth MIDI, and network MIDI into any DAW
Nothing that teaches
83 lessons, a chord trainer, a coach, and proof you're improving
Wrong notes, heard
Wrong notes caught and fixed in under 10 ms
It never touches the part you
already like. The keys stay the keys, same action, same feel, same
instrument under your hands. And when you do replace the keyboard one
day, the box unplugs and moves across with every lesson, recording
and week of progress on it.
How it works
Plug in. Play. It handles the rest.
The RK-1 listens to every note, understands the key
and chord you're in, and corrects notes that don't fit, before the
sound reaches your ears. Practice becomes rewarding on day one, so
you actually come back on day two.
Fixes wrong notes, live
Under 10
milliseconds from key to corrected sound. The better you play, the
lighter it touches, skilled players feel almost nothing.
Pedals for you
No sustain pedal? It
works an invisible one the way a pianist's foot does, chords ring,
runs stay clean, phrases end when you lift your hands.
Actually teaches
83 falling-note
lessons across 12 genres, a chord trainer with an 8-level
curriculum, and a coach that builds a daily plan from how you
really play.
Speaker built in
Plug in your keyboard
and hear music, nothing else to buy. Headphones auto-mute the
speaker for late nights, and the AUDIO IN jack lets you play along
with any song through the same output.
It's a synthesizer
136 voices on board,
25 of them original FM synthesis running live inside the box, with
tone, drive, attack and release you can shape while you play, plus
nine effect spaces. Plug in a silent controller and you have a
complete instrument: no computer, no plugins, no licences.
Proof you're improving
Practice streaks,
a printable report card, and an assist meter that falls as your
hands take over. The box's goal is to be needed less.
The whole room can watch
Tap teacher
mode and a QR code appears. Every phone in the room scans it and
sees your playing live, falling notes, chords, key, tempo. A whole
class follows one keyboard. It runs on your own Wi-Fi; nothing is
uploaded or recorded.
A screen is optional, and it doubles the
product
Everything that matters, correction, sustain, all
136 sounds, the metronome, recording, works with nothing but the
box and its own display. You can ignore every screen you own and
it is still a complete instrument. Or connect one and get much
more: point an iPhone, iPad, Android phone or any laptop at
rk1.local and the box serves you lessons, the piano roll,
the sound designer, the looper, the time machine and your progress
charts. No app, no account, nothing to install.
See the whole rack →
Take it anywhere
It's the size of a
paperback and runs off a phone charger or a USB battery. Your
keyboard plus this box is a complete instrument on a kitchen table,
in a hotel room, backstage, or on the floor of a practice room,
with a speaker, headphones, sounds and a recorder, and no laptop in
the bag.
Private by design
No account, no app, no cloud,
no microphone, no login, no plugins, no drivers, no forced updates.
Your playing never leaves the box, and unplugging the internet
changes nothing.
Then turn assist off. It is still worth the money.
Every argument against a box like this assumes the
correction is the product. It is not, it is one feature, it has a
physical off switch, and on a steady player it touches about
3% of notes anyway. Here is what you are buying with it
switched off:
A 136-voice sound module
25 original FM
voices generated live, plus a full General MIDI bank, with tone,
drive, attack and release you can shape while you play and nine
effect spaces after them. Turns any controller into an
instrument.
MIDI OUT that carries what you hear
The
corrected stream, or the untouched one with assist off, on a
5-pin DIN, into a synth, a module or an interface. And a
hardware bypass relay: if the box loses power mid-set, the
contacts fall closed and your MIDI runs straight through as if it
were a cable.
Pedaling on rigs that have none
It
follows your harmony and lifts at chord changes. On a controller
with no pedal jack that is not an assist feature, it is the
difference between playable and not.
Everything you played, kept
Every
session recorded as MIDI, thirty minutes you can scrub back
through, a looper that layers, and a chord transcript that exports
as a PDF chart. Nothing to arm, nothing to remember to press.
And when assist is on, it is
built to stay out of your way: blue notes over a dominant seventh
are left alone, grace notes and passing tones are left alone,
velocity raises the bar because a note you hit hard is one you
meant, and the intervention falls automatically as your accuracy
rises. The product's stated goal is to be needed less.
Hear it first
The sounds you already know.
Grand piano, Rhodes, organs, strings, sax, the
110 General MIDI instruments, which is what most people plug in for.
These clips are the real thing, rendered through the same soundfont
the box runs, not an impression of it.
The General MIDI sounds are the FluidR3_GM soundfont by Frank
Wen, used under the MIT license. They are sample-based, so the
box does contain recorded instrument samples, freely licensed
ones, and none taken from any commercial instrument. The 25 voices
above are our own, generated live with no samples at all.
Full notices.
And twenty-five we wrote ourselves.
Not samples of someone else's instrument, these are
generated live by the box's own FM engine, and these clips came out
of that same engine. Twenty-five of the 136 sounds are ours like
this; the rest are the General MIDI bank.
🔊These make
sound. Turn your volume down before you press play.
For the keyboard in the spare room
It knows what is wrong with your keyboard.
Old keyboards fail in ways their owners stop
noticing. One key shouts. One plays twice. One sticks down and
drones under everything until you hit it again. And a whole
generation of cheap controllers never sent velocity at all,
every note leaves at full blast whatever your finger did.
The RK-1 watches for all
four, fixes what can be fixed, and tells you the rest. A key
quietly smoothed over is a key you never get repaired, so it names
the ones that are failing.
A key that shoutsA worn contact sends a velocity
that has nothing to do with your touch. Learned after four wild
strikes, then evened out toward the playing around it, and
only if it swings both ways, because a key that is always
loud is you leaning on an accent.
A key that plays twiceA bouncing contact fires two
notes a few milliseconds apart. The second is dropped. Nothing
under 50 ms is a repeat anybody played.
A key that sticksHeld twenty seconds, it says so.
Held a minute, it lets go for you. Generous on purpose: organ
players hold drones, and silencing a note you meant is worse than
leaving one you did not.
A keyboard with no touchNothing can add velocity
that was never sent. But the box stops drawing conclusions from it
, correction stops trusting a 127 you never chose, and the
coach stops marking you down for dynamics your keyboard cannot
produce.
Which is the honest version of "works with
any keyboard": not only the ones still in good health.
Why it feels like an instrument
It decides before you hear it.
A wrong note is caught, judged against the key and
the chord, and replaced in four hundredths of a millisecond.
Sounding it takes the rest of the ten: that budget is the audio
buffer, not the thinking.
That is the whole trick. Around 10 ms is the threshold where a
player stops perceiving delay and it feels like an instrument;
past 20 or 30 it feels like software, and you
play worse to compensate.
This is why the RK-1 is a
box and not an app. No operating system to schedule around, no audio
driver, no plugin host, no laptop deciding something else is more
important. One job, dedicated hardware, every time you press a key.
You never hear the wrong note, not corrected afterwards,
not smoothed over. It was never sounded.
See it happen
Sixty seconds, one take.
▶
Film going here. One continuous take: a phrase played
badly with the box off, the same phrase with it on, no cuts and no
narration. Nothing staged, the piano roll on screen is the real
one, showing which notes moved.
Coming shortly. Want to be told when it lands?
Email us
and we will send it, nothing else.
Add a screen, get a studio
A studio rack that fits in your browser.
The box plays on its own. Point any screen at it,
iPhone, iPad, Android, laptop, open rk1.local, and it serves
you the whole rack over your own Wi-Fi. No app, no account, nothing
to install, nothing uploaded. Real screenshots:
Not a mock-up, a recording of the dashboard
running. Blue is what you played, green is a note the box
corrected, red shows where your finger actually landed, amber is
the bass it added underneath you.Six stage scenes react to your actual playing. One tap
fills a TV; camera mode hides every readout for a clean clip.The part that matters: the amber line is how much help
you needed, and it falls. Days played, minutes, notes and your
lightest-ever assist, kept on the box, shown to nobody.
Sample data from a
demo unit.
136 voices by family, favourites, and an effect for
each.A live tip from your own playing, and today's
plan.
The box itself
The box itself, rendered straight from the CAD file the case is
printed from. 150 × 100 × 40 mm.
Design rendering. Dimensions, controls and port layout are final; cases are 3D printed, so the real surface is matte and lightly textured rather than polished.
Everything you touch, on one strip. Green is correction,
amber is the pedal, and the rings tell you what the box is doing
from across the room.
Design rendering. Dimensions, controls and port layout are final; cases are 3D printed, so the real surface is matte and lightly textured rather than polished.
Small enough to forget. Loud enough not to.
About the footprint of a paperback, with a speaker
inside, every socket you need on the back, and one cable to the
wall.
Your keyboard, the box, your headphones. That's the
whole setup, and the box brings the sounds.Smaller than a paperback. Every socket is on the back: keyboard, power,
headphones, audio in, sustain pedal, MIDI in and out.Green means it has learned your key and is helping.
You just play.
A living product
The box you buy today is the worst one
you'll own.
The RK-1 isn't finished and shipped and forgotten.
It's a product we keep building, free updates, released steadily,
for as long as we're here. Everything on this page arrived that way,
and the pace hasn't slowed.
Free forever, and optional
Every update
costs nothing and always will. Nothing installs itself, the box
tells you what changed and waits for you to say yes. If a version
ever misbehaves, one button rolls you back to the last one that
worked.
Written from what players ask for
The
arpeggiator, the chord transcript, the on-screen keyboard, the
30-minute rewind, all of them came from people telling us what was
missing. Tell us what you need and it goes on the list.
Your history moves with you
Export
everything you've ever played, every session, take, score, custom
lesson and setlist, as one file, and restore it onto another RK-1.
Replace a box, hand one to a student, or buy a second: your history
comes with you.
You can read what changed
Every release
is written up in plain language, dated, with what was added and
what was fixed. No silent changes, no vague "improvements and bug
fixes."
One cable from your
keyboard, one to the wall. Press the button and play. No account,
no app, no software to install on anything, no pairing, no serial
number to type in.
Wi-Fi is optional and you can skip it
forever
Correction, pedaling, all 136 sounds, the
metronome and recording all work with no network at all. Wi-Fi
only adds the lessons and charts on a phone, and joining takes
two minutes, once, by tapping your network on a page the box
serves you.
If you get stuck, a person answers
Email
hello@risekeys.com. Not a
ticket system and not a bot, the person who built it. If we
cannot get you playing, the box comes back and we pay the
postage.
Built for people who did not ask for a
computer
It boots by itself, needs no updates you have to
take, and if you never open the dashboard it never nags you. Pull
the plug when you are finished; there is nothing to shut
down.
Early-adopter pre-order
RK-1 $199
You're pre-ordering: your unit ships in an estimated
4–6 weeks, with tracking the day it leaves. Cancel any time
before it ships for a full refund. $249 at retail launch.
Four finishes, one box. Pick yours at checkout.
Design rendering. Dimensions, controls and
port layout are final; cases are 3D printed, so the real surface
is matte and lightly textured rather than polished.
Not ready tonight?
Get one
email when it ships, one, and nothing else. No newsletter,
no offers, and we never pass your address on.
Early access unit · first production
run. These are hand-built, numbered, and the software keeps
improving after you get one. You get a direct line to the person
who built it.
Regulatory notice. This device has not
been authorized as required by the rules of the Federal
Communications Commission. It is not, and may not be, offered for
sale or lease, or sold or leased, until authorization is obtained.
Orders placed now reserve your unit and your price. No unit
is delivered until the RK-1 completes its FCC Part 15B
declaration, and your order is refundable in full at any point
before it ships, including if that takes longer than we
expect.
No keyboard yet? We don't sell them, but
here is exactly what to look for,
four requirements, what not to pay for, and what each price gets
you.
In the box: the RK-1, a USB-C power supply, and
the keyboard cable yours actually needs, you pick USB-B,
USB-C, micro-USB or 5-pin MIDI at checkout and we pack that one.
Nothing else required: no computer, no interface, no speakers.
Not sure which cable? Search your
keyboard →
Card checkout opens shortly. Until then we hold
early-adopter units by email, no payment taken now, no
obligation, and your $199 price is locked.
Every first-run box is hand-assembled,
factory-tested, numbered and initialed by the person who built
it, and carries a signed certificate the box itself verifies
against its own hardware. It can't be faked or copied onto
another unit.
Numbered & signed
Each first-run unit is
hand-assembled, factory-tested, then numbered and initialed by the
person who built it. Your number ships with a signed certificate
the box itself can verify.
No reviews yet, on purpose
Nothing has shipped, so
nobody has reviewed it. We'd rather say that than invent a
five-star wall. Renders are labeled as renders.
Wrong keyboard? Not your problem
If yours turns out
incompatible, that's treated like a faulty unit: full refund, we
pay return shipping, no restocking fee.
Who made this
I built the box I needed.
I’m Keith Adler. I started seriously
learning to play and produce in 2019, as an adult,
which mostly means practising badly in a room on my own and knowing
exactly how bad it sounded.
Since then I have written, produced and played on
records released through my own label, Daddy
Can’t Buy U A Hit Records, including soundtracks for
several films. I am registered with BMI. I am not a keyboard
company; I am someone who learned late and stayed.
The RK-1 came out of that. The thing that nearly
stopped me in the first year was not difficulty, it was that
honest practice sounds bad, and sounding bad is what makes
people quit before they get good.
And here is the part that used to make me want to
shut the lid: I usually had two of the three notes right. The
shape was there, the hand was in roughly the correct place, the
timing was fine. One finger a semitone out, and the whole chord
turns sour, a beginner cannot hear which note is
wrong, only that the sound is. You do not get 66% of a chord. You get
a bad one.
That is the gap the box closes. It knows which of the
three is the odd one out, moves that one, and leaves the two you had
right alone. Then it steps back as you stop needing it.
On my label everything is made under one rule:
the machine is the session player, not the songwriter. That
is the same rule here. Assist is off for every graded lesson, there
is a physical off switch, and the progress chart exists to show the
help shrinking. If this box is doing the playing, it has failed.
Pre-orders are a long quiet gap unless someone tells
you what is happening. Here is the whole plan.
TodayA confirmation email with your order number
and your colour. Your $199 price is locked whatever happens to the
retail price.
While you waitUpdates as the first run is built
, parts arriving, cases printed, units tested. Written by me,
not a marketing list.
Targeting mid-SeptemberYour unit is built,
numbered, factory-tested and initialed. Tracking the day it
leaves.
If it slipsYou get a real date and a real reason,
early. Cancel for a full refund at any point up to the moment it
ships.
After it arrives30 days to return it. Free software
updates for life, installed from the box itself. No account, no
subscription, nothing to renew.
One honest caveat: no unit
ships until the RK-1 completes its FCC Part 15B declaration.
That is why the date says targeting and not
guaranteed. How
pre-orders work.
