More thoughts on the Keychron Q7 and beyond (mostly beyond)

Having owned the Q7 for several months now, I feel like I’ve come to appreciate and enjoy the board more. I’ve also come to an understanding of what I feel works with the keyboard and what doesn’t work with it for me. I’ve also tried some minor modifications with the keyboard as well to varying degrees of success.

Firstly, I think what it has shown me is that I have come to be less appreciative of aluminum keyboard housings on the whole. I love the heft the provide, and the sheer quality of feeling by having a literal block of metal on my desk. And, with the right pairing of switches and keycaps, it can be a lot of fun. But it can also be more difficult to tune because one inherent aspect of a metal case is that it resonates with the sounds of the components far more strongly than other case materials. Good sounds are amplified, absolutely. However, sounds like spring ping, ticking, scratching, and such also are amplified. That makes it more challenging to get to the sound profile that I like.

I like deeper sounds, less of the high end and more bass. I like the sound profile afforded by thicker polycarbonate boards, like the NK65 Entry or Portico. I like how I can pull resonance into the keycaps on those boards by using higher profile keycaps with them. But using higher profile caps on the Q7 makes for a different experience. It does help deepen the sound through making a larger resonance chamber in each key but it also reflects more of the case sound as well, bringing those tones from the aluminum itself into the sound and aluminum simply isn’t the prettiest of sounds when it comes to metals.

To briefly tangent, one of my other hobbies is numismatics. That’s the pretentious, if technical, term for coin collecting. I can, and sometimes do with people, go on extensive expositions on coinage. And much like keyboards, materials science comes into play with coins as well. For instance, prior to 1982 all one cent pieces in the United States were made primarily from copper. That made them heavier, at roughly 3g, compared to the copper plated zinc that replaced them which weigh in at roughly 2.5g instead. It makes sense from an economic standpoint too, I get that. Even 40 years ago one cent was already worth less than the materials to make the coins. However, the biggest difference between the two is a detail down to the materials: resonance. Copper is a beautifully resonant metal. That’s why brass makes up an entire section of the orchestra in fact. It’s that gorgeous, musical quality where the metal resonates so dynamically and so intensely with the music that it literally is why the music works. Making a trumpet out of aluminum, or steel, or carbon fiber, or any number of other materials simply wouldn’t work precisely because of how sound functions with metals.

And that brings us back to aluminum keyboard cases. Aluminum is an aesthetically gorgeous metal. It’s easy to work with, lighter than most other metals, and in the modern world cheap to produce. Anodizing it allows you to produce a gorgeous range of colors that will hold true for decades, if not longer. It makes sense to use it as a material for construction. But what it doesn’t do is sound beautiful. It doesn’t have that musical tonality of softer, more precious metals like copper, silver, gold, and platinum. Making a solid copper keyboard case would be absolutely ridiculous. Choosing any of those other metals would be even less sensible. But, that’s where alloys come in to really shine. Alloys are blends of metallic elements to change their physical properties for any number of reasons. They change color, tensile strength, flexibility, durability, wear resistance, and even oxidation. But, an area that I think could be supremely relevant to keyboards is in sound.

Brass is one of the earliest alloys created. It’s a blend of copper and zinc and differing levels of each in the metal can tune the properties of the final alloy. Another alloy is of course steel, made from iron and carbon, but adding chromium makes it stainless steel. Steel also can have an interesting resonance pattern to it, such as in steel drums. These materials would make the keyboard inherently heavier due to their higher densities compared to aluminum, but they would bring with them their inherent musical qualities as well. As custom keyboards continue to develop and evolve they also lean into other hobbies exactly because people tend to have multiple hobbies that they enjoy. That’s why I find experiments like the Adam keyboard made of totally-not-Lego bricks. It brought together two things I really enjoy: Lego and keyboards, and meshed them into a fascinating and new experience of both at once.

It’s that kind of joint experience, or at least a join knowledge, that I feel could be a fascinating exploration in the world of keyboards. I see so many experiments with keyboards but often the cases are limited exclusively to the camps of various plastics or aluminum. Occasionally something unusual comes along, such as a ceramic or wooden case, but more unusual metals and metal alloys are simply not much of a thing in the world of keyboards. I see brass mentioned all the time when it comes to weights used in keyboards. Or they will use a brass plate for mounting the switches. The difficulty in manufacturing and materials compared to aluminum is a real concern. Brass is much more expensive compared to steel or aluminum. It’s harder and more difficult to work with as well. And there’s always that push for it to be a mirror finish because it does have that gorgeous golden shine.

But, if I were to consider a design myself, fit for daily usage, I’d honestly look more into something like a brushed brass finish. As beautiful as a mirror finish is, it is maddening to me from how quickly it would pick up dirt and oils even from clean hands. A rougher finish would dramatically alleviate that issue while retaining the intrinsic qualities that the alloy provides. Given the already musical qualities that we tend to consider keyboards, from a sound perspective, going further to an all-brass case makes sense to me. I see there are a handful of them out there, mirror-finished and frustratingly expensive. As utterly irrationally excessive as they are, I now find myself incredibly curious to experiment with one of the extant models.

But more importantly, I find myself really curious, and driven, to see if I could work with a machinist to build a custom case to my specifications out of brass. I’d certainly want to think of it as a prototype as well. I would love to add a wild product to the world of a hobby I have come to love and enjoy so much. And I’d really love to do so with the assistance of my more musically adept friends as well. I think pairing music with keyboards (well, beyond keyboards to add keyboards because I can’t let that opportunity slip) could be incredibly fun to do. I absolutely don’t doubt it would carry a more premium price to it. But with a community that clearly have more passion than sense (and often cents when that passion overrides sense) I somehow think that such experiments aren’t merely warranted, but are encouraged precisely because we are just that fascinated by our hobby.

I suppose this is more of a late-night contemplation but I know it’s one that will continue to pester me for time to come. I’m sure other boards will come out with this kind of a quirky feature well before I could act but the idea of doing a one-of-a-kind build is more than just a passing flight of fancy. It’s not that I even feel it would be the best or most amazing choice, or that I’d want it to be some sort of bizarre statement of wealth. I more so want to do it to push boundaries and to share with the world a very niche objet d’art. Because that is ultimately what it would be. It would be an art piece that I could also use daily in my life. I love going into artistic pursuits for no other reason than to do so for the sake of the art itself. Art need no more meaning to it than to simply exist for the sake of the artist’s desire to produce it. And in this case, I can’t think of many other works of art that I would rather put my name on to share with the world than a silly brass keyboard to just say that I could.