Beta testing & policies

Beta testing

• To ask for a beta unit, email hello@risekeys.com and tell us about your keyboard and what you play. We answer every message.
• No payment is taken during the beta. Anything else about a beta unit is agreed by email before it is sent.
• Hardware and software are still changing. Things will break, and we will tell you what changed.
• When the RK-1 is ready to sell, it will be announced on this site and everyone on the list gets one email.

Privacy

• If you email us, we use your address to reply to you and for nothing else. There is no checkout and no account.
• The RK-1 itself collects nothing. It has no account, no microphone, and works fully offline, your playing, recordings, and progress never leave the device.
• The only internet call the device ever makes is the update check: a plain fetch of a version file from risekeys.com, with no serial number, device identifier, or usage data attached. If you never connect it to Wi-Fi, or block it at your router, every feature still works.
• The dashboard and teacher mode are served on your local network only; nothing is streamed outside your home or classroom.

Sound & style names

• The 25 Rise Keys voices, including the "808"-style drum sounds, are synthesized from scratch in our own engine, from no samples or recordings of any kind.
• The other 110 sounds are the General MIDI bank, supplied by the FluidR3 GM soundfont by Frank Wen, used under the MIT licence. That soundfont is sample-based, so the RK-1 does contain recorded instrument samples, freely licensed ones, credited in the notices on the device and below. It contains no samples, ROMs or data taken from any commercial instrument or manufacturer.
• Names like "808" describe a well-known style of synthesized sound, the way "upright piano" describes a style of piano. Rise Keys is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or derived from Roland Corporation or any other instrument maker, and their trademarks belong to them.
• MIDI files you import as lessons stay on your device, are never uploaded or redistributed by us, and remain your responsibility, import only material you have the right to use.

Cookies & tracking

• risekeys.com sets no cookies. No ad pixels, no advertising networks, no cross-site tracking, no data sold or shared. Fonts are served from our own server. There is nothing to consent to, so there is no cookie banner.
• We do count page views using Cloudflare Web Analytics, which is cookieless: it records the page, the referring site, the country and the device type, with no identifiers, no fingerprinting and no profile of you. We use it to see which pages people find useful. It is not Google Analytics and nothing is passed to advertisers.

Beta units & FCC status

• Beta units are hand-built, numbered and initialed. The software keeps improving, and every improvement reaches a tester as an update.
• 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. This notice is required by 47 CFR § 2.803 and we would rather show it to you plainly than bury it.
• What that means in practice. The RK-1 uses a Raspberry Pi radio module that already holds its own FCC certification. The finished box still needs one Part 15B emissions scan at an accredited lab and a Supplier's Declaration of Conformity before any unit may be delivered in the US. That work is scheduled and funded; no unit is sold or delivered as a product before it is signed.
• Calling these units "beta" is a description of how they are built and supported. It is not a regulatory category and we do not present it as one.

Open-source software in the RK-1

• The RK-1 runs on Raspberry Pi OS (Debian) and uses open-source components. The full license text for every one of them is installed on the device at /usr/share/doc/, and listed below.
• The General MIDI sounds come from the FluidR3 GM soundfont by Frank Wen, used under the MIT license, played by FluidSynth (LGPL-2.1), which runs on the box as a separate program.
• Also included, all under permissive licenses: Python (PSF-2.0), mido, python-rtmidi, luma.oled and Pillow (MIT), numpy, pyserial, gpiozero and python-qrcode (BSD), sounddevice and PortAudio (MIT), and PyNaCl (Apache-2.0).
• Written offer: for any GPL or LGPL component distributed with the device, we will provide the complete corresponding machine-readable source, for three years from the date you received your unit, on request to hello@risekeys.com. This covers those components' own source code; the Rise Keys application itself is not open source.
• None of this costs you anything, and none of it expires. It is part of why the RK-1 has no subscription and keeps working with the internet unplugged.

The mailing list

If you give us an address for “tell me when it is ready”, here is exactly what happens to it.

We write once, when the RK-1 is ready to sell. That is what the list is for. If we ever want to send anything else, we will ask first.

It stays in our email inbox and nowhere else. We do not sell it, rent it, trade it, or hand it to an advertising network. Every email has a one-click unsubscribe, and you can ask us to delete the address entirely at hello@risekeys.com without giving a reason.

This is separate from the privacy promise about your playing. Nothing you play ever leaves the RK-1, there is no server for it to go to. An email address you typed into a form is a different thing, and we would rather draw that line ourselves than let the two blur.

Product images

The RK-1 is in beta, so the product photography on this site is computer rendering, not photographs of a finished unit. We would rather say that plainly than have you find out when the box arrives.

What the renderings show accurately: the size, the proportions, the two illuminated controls and the position and labelling of every socket. Those come from the same CAD the enclosure is actually printed from and from the real boards inside, and they are not expected to change.

What will differ: the finish. Every case is 3D printed, so the real surface is matte and lightly textured, and catches light differently from the smooth material in the renderings. Colours are approximate and vary between screens. Small details, fastener positions, the exact shade of the button rings, silkscreen weight, may change as the first run is built.

We will replace these with photographs of real units as soon as there are real units to photograph.

Trademarks

Yamaha, Roland, Casio, Korg, Kawai, Alesis, Arturia, Akai, M-Audio, Novation, Donner, and any other brand names mentioned on this site are trademarks of their respective owners.

On classic-synthesizer heritage, said plainly: several RK-1 voices are original FM synthesis inspired by the great electronic instruments of the 1980s. They are programmed from scratch, the RK-1 contains no ROM data, no sampled content, and no patch data from Yamaha or any other manufacturer, and it does not emulate any specific product. DX7 is a trademark of Yamaha Corporation; Rise Keys is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or derived from Yamaha. We admire that era's instruments, and we respect their makers' rights, the sounds in this box are ours.

Yamaha, Roland, Casio, Korg, Kawai, Alesis, Arturia, Akai, M-Audio, Novation, Donner, and any other brand names mentioned on this site are trademarks of their respective owners. They are used solely to indicate compatibility with class-compliant USB MIDI equipment. Rise Keys is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by any of these companies. "Rise Keys" and "RK-1" are trademarks of Rise Keys.

Terms & disclaimers

• Product images on this site include artist's renderings; final product appearance may vary. Specifications may be refined before the RK-1 is sold.
• Bluetooth MIDI adds roughly 10–20 ms of latency versus a USB cable, so a cable is always the tightest way to play.
• Rise Keys is a practice and performance aid; rates of musical progress vary by person and practice time.
• You must be 18 or older to join the beta, or use the site with a parent or guardian.
• To the extent permitted by law, our liability is limited to the amount you paid us for the product. Nothing in these terms limits rights you have under applicable consumer protection law.
• All site content, the Rise Keys software, and the RK-1 design are © 2026 Rise Keys. All rights reserved.

Questions

Email hello@risekeys.com, a human reads it.