The RK-1 modernizes any MIDI keyboard. Plug in
the keys you already own, from a controller bought last week to a
board from 1998, and it becomes a current instrument: 136 sounds,
automatic pedaling, live note correction, lessons and a speaker,
out of one small box.
Beta units are hand built and numbered. Not for sale yet.
No subscription
No account
No cloud
RK-1 · artist's rendering, final appearance
may vary · every unit numbered & signed
<1 msto decide on each
note
83built-in lessons
136sounds on board
0subscriptions or accounts
No subscription. No account. No cloud.
You buy the box once and updates are free for life. Everything
except the dashboard works with no Wi-Fi at all. Nothing to
install, no app store, no operating system it cares about.
Any screen, all at once.
The box serves its own dashboard to any browser on your Wi-Fi: an
iPad on the stand, a laptop beside you, a phone in your pocket, all
showing the same box and staying in step. Change a sound on the iPad
and the laptop follows a moment later.
The sound never leaves the box.
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. Nothing you tap on screen adds delay, because the live
audio path never leaves the box.
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. Five 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, this is not for you. 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 a millisecond, 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
keyboard we will want to hear about, so write to us.
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 before you hear them
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.
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 in our benchmark it corrected
none of a steady player's notes anyway. Here is what it gets you
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 well under a millisecond: we
measured 0.007 ms on a development board. Everything after that
is the audio buffer, not the thinking. That is the whole trick.
Delay below roughly 10 ms is where most players stop noticing it
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.
Measured, not estimated
These numbers come from running
the RK-1 software on real ARM hardware. They were taken on a
Raspberry Pi 500 development board, which is several times
faster than the Pi Zero 2 W inside the RK-1, so treat them
as the best case. The full-path figure on final hardware is still to
come.
Audio block
Buffer
Time to render
Headroom
512 samples
11.6 ms
1.33 ms
8.6x
256 samples
5.8 ms
0.91 ms
6.3x
128 samples
2.9 ms
0.70 ms
4.1x
64 samples
1.5 ms
0.59 ms
2.4x
Judging and correcting one note took
0.007 ms. Rendering 24 voices at once fit inside every
buffer size tested, at 44.1 kHz. These figures time the
software only: USB transport and the audio output stage are not
included, and the Pi Zero 2 W will need a larger
buffer than the fastest setting shown.
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.
Drawn from the same CAD file the case is printed from:
150 × 100 × 40 mm.Smaller than a paperback. Every socket is on the back: keyboard, power,
headphones, audio in, sustain pedal, MIDI in and out.
A living product
The box you try today is the worst one
you'll use.
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 set up 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, we want to know why.
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.
Beta testing
RK-1 is in beta.
A small group of players is testing the RK-1 now. It is
not for sale yet, and there is nothing to order. If you want to
try one, tell us about your keyboard and what you play.
Four finishes, one box.
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.
No mail app? Write to
hello@risekeys.com. A person answers. We will write when the
beta changes, and nothing else: no newsletter, no offers, and we
never pass your address on.
Beta unit · hand built. These are
numbered, and the software keeps improving as testers use them. 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.
A beta unit comes with the RK-1, a power supply and
the keyboard cable yours needs. Nothing else is required: no
computer, no interface, no speakers.
Not sure which cable? Search your
keyboard →
Unit №001 of the
first run
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 gone to
customers, so nobody has reviewed it. We'd rather say that than
invent a five-star wall. Renders are labeled as renders.
Beta means beta
Hardware and software are still
changing. Things will break, and what you tell us decides what
gets fixed first.
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.
