It all started when I asked myself why I still suck at guitar and piano, despite a decade of on and off playing.

On piano, jumping between keys/modes is non-trivial, unless you have an extensive amount of practice building memory and muscle memory. And guitar...guitar is just so much work to play, even with years of practice. In both cases, the result is that your playing is biased due to memory and finger-strength constraints.

I've realized now that both piano and guitar are (very) unnecessarily difficult. It only took me 15 years of failure to realize it. What's really odd is that I look around and see very few people also realizing this. Instead I see many people struggling to play their instruments, especially on guitar with people generally sticking to 3-chord songs.

I ended up getting a Linnstrument. Best decision I've ever made. I feel limitless now, musically. The device is high quality, has lots of buttons (I got the larger version), and is fully programmable (it uses an Arduino). It may seem pricy, but you're dealing with something one-of-a-kind here, totally worth it.

The feature that sold me is that you can choose what scale you want to be in, and it will light up only those notes in the scale. This works out of the box, but if you're willing to do some C programming, you can extend it however you want. (I programmed mine to use a different color for each note.) From what I've seen, both piano and guitar communities tend to be snobs about lighting up scale notes: "lights are for children", "lights are a crutch, learn the scales without them". These people are ignorant. I've gone from 0 to 100 very quickly due to being able to light up scales. I also drive with a GPS.

Exquis looks pretty awesome, too!

If you learn your circle of fifths it is quite trivial, because nearby scales on the circle (i.e. scales that have tonal centers a fifth apart) only add or remove a single black key. F to C (Bb becomes B) to G (F becomes F#) to D (C becomes C#) etc. is very easy and a lot of music will stick to those. Learning scales on guitar (or indeed on an isomorphic keyboard, for that matter) is only slightly harder, the trick there is knowing your solfège so that you can find your way around the semitone intervals and (for guitar) what to expect when you shift to a nearby string.

When you put it that way, buying an Omnichord sounds a lot more straight forward.

One does not simply buy a used MacBook. Or install Reaper. Let alone map Midi controllers.

And that’s without waiting for updates, registering on websites, and installing the right OS.

I can play piano and I'm still kinda tempted.