Thoughts on Keyboards – Summer 2023

It’s funny, adding experiences with keyboards and going through all sorts of premium to budget options over time. Sometimes, the more premium option really shines. Sometimes the premium option falls completely flat. Ultimately, your taste will change over time, and you will find yourself developing preferences for different components over time. Often, things that you really enjoyed when you first started will end up becoming less to your taste, and things you didn’t enjoy may become more enjoyable.

I’ve talked before how when I started using my first mechanical keyboards, they all featured Cherry clicky switches, starting with Blue then onto Green switches. Now I find myself not enjoying them nearly as much. I find the sound of Cherry’s click-jacket style switches to be grating, annoying, overly plasticky. Even different style clicky switches, such as Kailh’s click-bar style switches like the Box Navy and Speed Pink aren’t to my preference anymore. I find the sound distracting, grating at times. I still want to explore some of the newer clicky switches, specifically NovelKeys Cream Clickie switches and Zeal’s Clickiez switches. Both offer a novel approach that I’m curious to see how they feel and sound. And both are almost an opposite implementation from each other with NovelKeys’ option being extremely subtle tactility and a quieter click and Zeal’s being heavily tactile with a much stronger click.

In any event, that’s really where I find myself with the hobby. I want to continue to explore and find new and interesting switches and keyboards to try out. The innovation within the keyboard community is what keeps it fresh and interesting, and I love to see that continue. I also love to see how as the hobby becomes more popular, aspects that used to be represented almost entirely through pricy and niche products in small runs are now found even in budget components. Most striking is how quickly factory switch lubrication has become so widely available even in budget switches. That alone has been a wonderful move.

Previously, to get the smoothest switch experience you had to dedicate at least an hour, often multiple hours, to disassembling, lubricating, then reassembling your choice of switches. I’ve done so numerous times now. And while the results are great, the process itself is honestly gruelling at times. I have to be in a mood to know I’m going to spend the next hours repeating the same process over and over and I so often don’t feel up to the task. It’s not generally painful, but it is tiring and can become frustrating from the sheer repetitiveness of doing it. Being able to browse and find switches with decent lubrication from the factory dramatically lowers the tedium of building keyboards. Even if they aren’t perfect, being 80% of the way there is well worth not having to manually lubricate the switches. It also means I’m not covering my hands in lubricant for hours on end and that also is a huge win in my mind.

And it’s something that is also greatly beneficial to people who want to be able to have a much smoother typing experience but otherwise would have issues with the hand lubrication process. Notably, people with various forms of neurodivergence or physical disabilities may have much less ability to access lubricated switches before. Either because they physically couldn’t do the lubrication process or simply because the option was prohibitively expensive. I remember when I started that many of the smoothest switches were produced in small batches and were notoriously expensive, upwards of $1 per switch. Even a 60% keyboard would cost upwards of $70 just in switches. Now with a flood of options, good, factory lubricated switches can be had for as little as $0.20 a switch, a fifth that price of entry. Hell, the switches I’m using right now are some of my favourite switches and they’re my Leobog Graywood V3 switches. They’re a budget-minded factory lubricated switch that found initial popularity in China but has since become available outside China. I was able to get them for $26 for 100 switches and at that price I really haven’t found any other linear switches that are comparable for the price to quality, though some are close. I want to try Gateron’s Pro line that are also factory lubricated at a similar price-point for instance.

And, really, the build I’m using right now isn’t a particularly exciting one. It’s those Leobog switches, NovelKeys own PBOW PBT keycaps, their NK65 Entry keyboard, and some budget stabilisers that I fiddled with to get them to perform excellently. All said, because all of those parts were bought during sales, I got a full custom keyboard for under $150 and that’s honestly a fantastic price given the results I have from it. I also know I could cut even more corners and arrive at another great keyboard build under $100 and both of those prices were out of the realm of possibility just a few short years ago if I wanted to retain the features and quality that I have here. That’s frankly amazing and I’m so pleased to see the keyboard hobby become democratised like that. Gone are the days where it was expected for people to pay several hundred dollars to build a keyboard. You still can, quite easily, spend well over $1000 on a single keyboard but that’s become even more edge-case and niche than it was years ago. There’s a smaller and smaller quality gap between the ultra-high-end and even budget tier parts now. 

Not to say you won’t notice a difference, just that many of the ideas and traits of those ultra-high-end products have wound their way down into the budget parts. Want a solid aluminium case? There are now dozens of them offering hotswap, full RGB, various mounting methods, and fully programmable with Via. You can still find those extremely expensive boards, but you can now find those features in widely available boards like the NK65, Keychron’s Q series of boards, or KBDFans new Tofu 2.0 line. It’s even more interesting when you broaden your selection to feature acrylic or polycarbonate cases because the price can drop precipitously from a metal case. I think I’ve come to prefer the sound of polycarbonate cases in fact. I still love my Portico and this NK65 Entry. I don’t care for the resonance of aluminium versus other metals. It is very pingy and doesn’t have that musical quality found in other metals like copper or brass. It’s why you never see aluminium instruments. I still want to see about having a more musically inclined case but that’s also on the backburner simply due to the sheer cost that will be involved in having a massive block of copper or brass versus aluminium or steel. 

I’ve found that plastics, because they inherently absorb those metallic tones and act as an insulator versus a resonator, make for an excellent material choice. I simply love the sound of this keyboard. I hear the tapping of all the keys, the thunk of the spacebar, it’s just a lovely experience in my opinion. I like it more than my original Tofu 60 and even my Keychron Q7 that is a distinctly more premium keyboard. Those two are also fun keyboards but they have an audio quality to them that I find less appealing overall than my polycarbonate keyboards. I still think I want to try more aluminium keyboards, mostly to see how they have improved to negate the inherent pinging of aluminium. I think various changes in construction, such as gasket mounting and force breaking (initially a mod wherein tape is placed between the two halves of aluminium cases to prevent them from resonating into each other). I think I’d also like to try out other case materials, such as wood, to see how that also affects the sound of a keyboard. And I could see that being interesting because different types of wood have their own characteristics, with different densities and grain qualities influencing the sound and how sound resonates through them. It’s why a Stradivarius violin is so coveted, not simply because of the master craftsmanship from Stradivari but also from the particular qualities of the woods he used to construct his instruments. 

And I think that’s much of where I see myself going with this hobby from now. I see myself getting deeper into the weeds, to understand the construction and materials and how they interact with each other to form a final product. I think there is a lot of potential for innovation still and that is exciting. For instance, instead of opting for wood, metal, or plastic, I think a quality focused case built from bamboo could produce interesting results, both aesthetically and acoustically. Bamboo, because of its incredible growth rate, is much less dense than wood. And whilst that would result in a greater hollowness in sound, I think it could be used as a strength if it’s built into that rather than trying to build around it. After all, there are bamboo instruments as much as there are wooden instruments. They just aren’t the same instruments. Bamboo makes a beautiful flute but you’re not going to see a bamboo acoustic guitar or violin. It’s all about using the materials you have wisely rather than going for the cheapest or most premium materials simply because of that price.

I keep coming back to acoustics because that is part of what makes keyboards so much fun for me. Sure, feel and appearance are also deeply important. However, sound is what I notice most when I’m actually using the keyboard. I touch type. I’m not looking down and enjoying the beautiful case or keycaps. But I am listening to the music my fingers are creating by typing. And focusing more into the musicality of keyboards is something I’m more than just passingly curious about. I am fascinated by sound and by music and I can see many of the same knowledge from the art of producing musical instruments could be applied to keyboards because many of the traits between both are more than just tangentially related. I think that’s what happens when someone like me finds themselves in a hobby. I find connections between subjects constantly. It’s how my brain has always worked. It’s how I make sense of the world. And while it can be frustrating at times it can also be deeply rewarding and allow me to use a very broad base of knowledge to pull from seemingly disparate sources to marry them into an end product that is better specifically because of that knowledge. Now I just need to find someone else who’s also that unusual set of quirky to actually bring something tangible to market.