Anybody who has talked to me for more than a couple of minutes know I have little to talk about other than a couple things, with mechanical keyboards perhaps at the top of my list. Relatively speaking, throughout my “internet career,” getting into mechanical keyboards was probably the first major upgrade I made to my setup after getting a decent PC and dual-monitor setup thanks to my step-father, and seeing as how this website is about 90% keyboards (along with the primary keyboard page that housed a smaller version of this article) I saw it fitting to muse about my journey to where I am now in keyboards. I also really wanted to get the huge blurb off the main Keyboards page so my reviews were more front-and-center.

From Word-of-Mouth to Words-Out-of-My-Mouth

My mechanical keyboard addiction interest started in about 2015 when I received my first board: A Corsair STRAFE RGB. Prior to this, I was of course using whatever keyboard was at nearest reach, whether it was the keyboard built in on my laptop or some janky office keyboard when I was at my desktop. Around 2015 is when I started heavily investing in watching streamers on Twitch, particularly raysfire, at the time a semi-pro Team Fortress 2 player, with some dabbling in osu! and speedrunning Super Mario Sunshine. Between his streaming and other TF2 content creators at the time investing into mechanical keyboards as some technical edge in gaming skill, I also fell victim to the “get best gear to become best gamer” trappings.

After a bit of not-so-subtle hinting to my parents about wanting a mechanical keyboard, the STRAFE got to me eventually. Immediately I was enamored by the Cherry MX Reds having a fully linear and smooth travel, which felt jarring but satisfying, and as time went on it truly did make me better at gaming and typing, likely out of enthusiasm for playing with a new toy, but there is some merit still argued to this day about the advantage of mechanical over membrane. The STRAFE remained with me for a good couple years, mainly because I didn’t know any better about other brands, and I played around with the RGB as any new PC user does. The STRAFE did run with me through Team Fortress 2 as well as osu! which I had started getting into in 2016. Getting exposed to osu!, however, also introduced me to a community pretty fervant about their keyboards, given rhythm games are very finnicky with their input devices between reliability and latency.

As mentioned, the STRAFE stayed on the desk for a while, seemingly unproblematic, but watching osu! streamers, in this case Rafis, a couple brands came up. Most streamers had either a Ducky keyboard, a Varmillo keyboard, or a Leopold keyboard. The latter two didn’t appeal to my RGB-the-fuck-out-of-everything brain in 2017, so eventually I decided to go out and buy a Ducky Shine 6. In sacrifice of Corsair’s RGB and programming flexibility, I got a board that sounded a hair better and definitely looked a great margin better. With the same, boring Cherry MX Reds, I didn’t really gain any extra feel interest, but I also didn’t feel like I needed to change as I was used to Reds. And that was where I lied for a while.

You can find my more in-depth review of the Ducky Shine 6 on my website here.

The World of Customization

Some time in 2019, a small “customer-first” gaming peripherals company called Glorious entered the keyboard frey with its very interesting (for the time) Glorious Modular Mechanical Keyboard (GMMK) series. For $60, you get a keyboard (either 60%, TKL, or full size) off the shelf, but without any switches or keycaps installed. The reason? Put your own switches and keycaps that you like on the board, through the usage of hotswap sockets. For most people post-COVID era, it might seem weird to highlight such a simple feature as hotswappability. However, prior to mechanical keyboards getting a mainstream boost from COVID, hotswap keyboards were very few and far between, mostly being relegated to custom keyboards which at that point was very much a niche-within-a-niche.

I had first learned of the GMMK boards through yet another osu! streamer™, WubWoofWolf, whose video and stream catalog is pretty much mostly wiped out, so I can’t find a proper source material for it. But I found out about it through there and him very much making a monstocity of a build by utilizing a pair of each switch included in his sample pack, because he simply wasn’t given a bunch of one switch to use. Running in parallel, a friend through a non-osu!-related streamer (it was raysfire’s stream again) was also dipping their toes into the proper custom keyboard hobby with a Tofu, and for a good while was harassing me about getting into it as well, given the big computer nerd that I was at the time. So, away I went with my GMMK TKL, a batch of Kailh BOX Reds and Kailh BOX Jades.

Check out my review of the GMMK TKL here.

Another year later in 2020, was perhaps the biggest event in Keyboarding history: the revered “Making of Tfue’s $3500 Custom Luxury Mechanical Keyboard” video by TaehaTypes. Between a combination of sticker-shock, big gaming names, Fortnite, and COVID created a huge phenomenon out of the Mechanical Keyboards hobby. Of course, as somebody who had yet to really dip their toes into custom keyboards, I was not about to dive in $3500 deep on a custom board without knowing what I’m doing. But, other than the huge price of a custom anodized Keycult, what else were people frothing at the mouth about? The self-proclaimed “self-lubing” Novelkeys x Kailh Cream switches, and I kind of bit into the hype a bit buying about 60 or so just to try out in the GMMK TKL. To the dismay of most peopl who bought into this hype, the alleged cheat code to not needing to lube your switch was very much overstated. While technically true, it simply remained scratchy in sound and texture, it just didn’t wear out as fast because of the way POM interacts with friction. But it still sounded nice and felt good as one of the earlier adopters of the long-pole stem.

Peak Employment Activities

Another year later in 2021, after COVID was starting to let up, I finally got myself a job and finally had a stable source of income. I know, crazy. Around the same time, Glorious came back into the fray with, at the time, probably the start of accessibility in the custom keyboard hobby. The GMMK Pro was now the first “premium” off-the-shelf customizable keyboard you could buy, starting at the relatively good price of $179, during a time where most custom kits were closer to the $250-350 mark. Without knowing better about Glorious’ marketing, their suspicious business practices and outright design theft, I also bit into this shiny-looking apple of hype. I did the tried-and-true 2021 combo of Gateron Black Inks on a PC plate topped with GMK WoB. In a way, I thought I got the current “meta” configuration and started out with the best components I could. For some time, I was satisfied with my end product, until the itch to make more came back.

See my breakdown about the GMMK Pro here.

Throughout the last few months of 2021, I kind of let keyboards flow in unwisely fast, starting with a couple “insane value budget thocckers” (a pair of GK68’s), and a Tofu65 (the original tray mount one) for something more “refined.” At the time, I thought I was really going to make a pretty wide sweep of keyboard products to get an idea of the whole landscape, wholly unaware that it would be a fool’s task trying to keep up with the keyboard market.

At the same time, I had also planned to get my stepfather and roommate some Christmas gifts using my newfound hobby. My stepfather is pretty OG when it comes to internet fads, and that includes older anime, especially Ghost in the Shell and Evangelion. Fortunately, at the time Mecha-01 was running which, as most people do he prefers Asuka and Unit-02, but I’m still on the hunt for that (especially after missing MW Asuka being a thing), and paired with a KBD75 with the fun LED accent midpiece along with frankenswitches combining the green Akko CS Matcha Green stems and purple Akko CS Lavender housings, guh. It was a thing of beauty in my eyes and I am eternally jealous I won’t see that thing for the foreseeable future since he moved away. It also ended up being my first solder build which fortunately didn’t go bad at all, and I think it ticked something in my brain in the future.

Our roommate, on the contrary, was very DIY and did a bunch of woodwork, so a wood-themed board was also apropos. Pretty on-par with my previous builds, I opted for the wooden kit of the GK61, plus some Kailh Chocolate Creams and Akko ASA Chocolate, it came togther nicely as well. Anyway, that was quickly two people indoctrinated into the hobby, more so my stepfather than my roommate, though.

You can read my scathing reviews on the SK/GK68s here as well as my very brief Tofu 65 review here.

2022 had a slightly late start to recoup after my first Christmas where I could actually get people things instead of just receiving, and obviously I got to learn the toll Christmas takes on one’s wallet first-hand. But, this was also my first year getting a tax return, and because I hadn’t claimed any stimulus from COVID, it was a very, very fine tax return. The first thing any 20-something year old does with a nice chunk of change is get a banger upgrade to their PC, and I sent it. 5800X, ROG Dark Hero VIII, 32GB of 3600MHz memory, a 3070ti (which was still a crazy $1000 at the time…), my first time with water cooling, bunch of RGB fans, Asiahorse cable extensions, I went all out without going insane. I still am on that PC, too, but I do have itches to change to a more minimalistic ITX PC since my tastes have greatly changed since then. But once that was done, it was time to continue locking in on keyboards.

Around the same time as my PC splurging, Keychron also announced their sequel “custom” keyboard to the Q1, the Q2, with redone internals to make it not a ping machine like its predecessor. The Q2 received a lot of positive press from many keyboard reviewers, still with some of the typical quips like the default plate being steel and sub-par stock stabilizers. So, come March I built one and it was my new favorite toy of the month. At the same time, my girlfriend’s birthday was coming up and I also wanted to find a way to suck her into the hobby a bit. Naturally, another plate was spun, and that plate was a little more basic than prior builds: An Akko 3068B in the Black/Pink colorway with TTC Princess switches (which was a snide remark since she didn’t like being called Princess for being bri’ish). Admittedly, it was a pretty low effort build, but it was pretty last minute in 2022 before a wide palette of readily-available keyboards were available, and it was going to somebody some 900 miles away with a pretty invasive and destructive family. Later on I also picked up a Q3 since I liked my Q2 experience enough, and wanted a TKL for my collection.

I have also reviewed both mentioned Keychron boards here.

Chasing for Cherries and Something Better

I’ve probably lost you by now, but just in case let me make sure I don’t lose you on the fact we’re still in 2022, despite the new section. The main reason we’re still in 2022 here is for one key event: After all my more “modern” offerings, I wanted to get into something more “vintage” inspired after also including a set of Akko’s “Vintage” Cherry profile set in the aforementioned 3068B gift (its basically 9009 clones). So, between Omnitype’s release of OTC dye-sub PBT and my discovering of the Cherry G80-inspired NCR-80, I grabbed those along with my first venture into Cherry with modded MX Blacks.

In my hubris, I was also still at an uncertain point about which switches but I wanted to experience plateless since I felt that was more appropriate to the style (not knowing that original G80s were, in fact, plated), so I also delved into the option of Millmax, essentially a way to convert a solder PCB into one you can hotswap. However, once all was said and done (and it was relatively easy even with the tiny 7305 sockets, I only flooded two of them), it was my masterpiece aesthetically. I did end up adding tape and polyfil into the case because of the crazy reverb present, but once that was done, I was just in love with the build immediately. It also ended up planting the seed for my inevitable MX Blacks conversion, but I don’t think I had fully realized it yet. I still really enjoy my NCR-80 to this day, although I have since rebuilt it more inspired by Topre/EC boards.

My review on the NCR-80 is a bit nuanced, but I dive deep into that opinion here.

Finally passing through to 2023, it was a somewhat slow year in comparison to the prior couple years, but I attempted some big moves. Earlier in 2022, around May, Mechs & Co opened up preorders for GMK Arch, which while I wasn’t a concurrent Linux user, I had previously used Arch as a daily driver between 2018-2020 before kind of not being satisfied with the current state of Linux and going back to Windows, so it was kind of funny to grab it, and it just genuinely looked like a nice set. It had finally arrived right at the end of 2022 (literally 12/31) and I was giddy about it. Part of the fun with the set was it inspired me to dip my toes into making a custom board specifically for Arch, in the spirit of making a jank one-off solution that works exactly as the end user needs. I’ve already got a whole article about my adventure with what has now come to be called the Alicianrone, so if you want to dive more into that story, I’ve got it linked here.

Shortly after throughout the first few months of 2023, I also invested in a Wooting 60HE and a recase into a Tofu Redux case as well as a Wyse 50 from the 80s, but I would say they are mostly insignificant in my journey of keyboards, as the Wooting was simply a gaming tool that still doesn’t get much recognition past that, and the Wyse was pretty much exclusively for harvesting for vintage MX Blacks. I don’t regret these footnotes, but I don’t think they warrant a whole deep dive on this story.

Fast forward to May of 2023, off the heels of the NCR-80 build and starting my own board, I start my hunt for “better,” more expensive boards that “do things right.” Not only do I want to get better ideas on how to make my own board sound good, but I also simply want to further my collection. Lots of humming and hawing back and forth as I look at in-stock options, I eventually land on CannonKey’s Brutal65 V2, specifically in navy to pair with the set of GMK Dots I’d acquired the year before. I’d even done a lot of research on other people’s builds and came to conclusion that yeah, this would be my first “really good board.” And at first, with some foam, it was okay. But then I tried to take it out to allow the switches to have their own sound, and it just wasn’t committing to the sound aspect for me. It wasn’t bad, but it was always flat, and nothing else would simply sound nice in the board. Long story short, I kind of burned myself on $350 with a board that didn’t meet my expectations, but at least looks pretty in my collection.

You can read my pretty brutal review about the Brutal65 V2 here.

For personal 2023 stuff, that’s about it. However, towards the end of 2023, I had also planned to get a decent upgrade for the previous 3068B gift, this time trying to make sure it was absolutely a proper build that I thought was good, on top of that, I wanted to give my girlfriend the opportunity to experience building it herself. Naturally, the easiest build experience was an o-ring board, which I hadn’t really delved into yet. I wanted to retain the same 65% layout, so naturally I gravitated towards the Bakeneko65 also from CannonKeys (because surely I wouldn’t be let down going to the same company twice, right?). I’d also done a bit of research for this one, essentially calling the Bakeneko a “Unikorn on a budget,” so I got to work. And admittedly, it was not a bad experience; some QC concerns, but an otherwise had a great sound and easy build experience. It also turned into my first piece of long-form content that wasn’t just a sound test, but also delving into the history of the Unikorn and o-ring mount boards in general. So, job well done I suppose. It did leave a taste in my mouth for o-ring boards and I kinda wanted to find one in the future

ok but actually for real this time

Alright, slow 2023, probably wise after how much I put into 2021 and 2022. But surely, 2024 was going to be my Keyboard Year that I come out triumphant.

Starting off with New Years deals, CannonKeys (when am i going to stop) launched a 50% Mystery Bakeneko sale, which came out to $60 for a 60% kit, so I got two: one for me and one to take care of my roommate’s birthday ahead of time with something new. Using my fresh knowledge about the Bakeneko, I modded it all the same way, even getting a universal aluminum plate to put on top of it and an aftermarket waffling60 PCB for additional layout options. Immediately, I was entranced both by how much I actually enjoyed the 60% layout with all the enthusiast fixings of stepped caps lock, split backspace, split right shift, and the symmetrical 7u bottom row. However, as time went on I noticed a very distinct ping and resonance that slowly started drilling itself into me as I typed more on it. It gradually became a problem for me, and really made me hesitant to use it. But, I didn’t want to give up on finding a good board yet.

Once again, another scathing review here, this time for the Bakeneko.

As a couple quick side notes, shortly after that, a very, very tempting group buy came into vision thanks to alexotos. The Class 0413, fashioned after the G80-0413 but in big, chunky aluminum and brass goodness. And oh man, with the build he did, I was on board just aesthetically, but it sounded really good to boot, so I hopped on that group buy. During the year, Omnitype was also hosting their series of Happy Hour sales which were weekly flash sales on products, and their ultimate event was the “Happiest Hour” which included unvaulting a lot of old, old stock. And what would you have it, my chase set from the beginning of the hobby, Modern Dolch 2, had some spares. So I very quickly, probably unwisely bought myself into getting one for me and one for my stepfather, since he also likes teals/cyans.

Oh hey, also I’m moving. Things were getting heated at the current house after my stepfather and his now-wife left and I would end up moving with my mother to get away from the current situation. Let’s just say that extra Bakeneko was unintentionally a way to keep things cool before I got out of there.

New place, new opportunities, right? Let’s do a paradigm shift then. What’s the current classic enthusiast board that’s basically a surefire winning ticket? TKL, very classy layout. Let’s also do top mount; very solid both feel and sound-wise, get it in plastic like PC or PP to make it not harsh. Then let’s also top it with some Cherry switches. Can’t go wrong, right? Well, after a bunch of deliberation with some people, I eventually found myself looking at the Milan by MakerKeyboards, which was on a pretty good sale since they had been holding onto a lot of stock that just wasn’t moving for a while. With the addition of getting both a PC and a PP plate made by Tom (the goat) at HypeKeyboards. Put it all together and, oh my god. I finally did it. It’s a board that sounds good, with good volume, with essentially no mods.

Alright, one lucky board, right? Let’s run it back then. I want a good 60 again. What’s the best bang-for-buck 60 right now? The plateless Arc60? Which sounds like a dream? And only costs about $200-250 aftermarket? Alright, let’s pull for it. Oh, oh man. Ohhh man.

Okay, one more? Alright, lets also get that Class 0413 in from its Group Buy. It’s a little late, but better late than neve- Oh. It also sounds good. They all sound amazing am I finally free from the clutches of mediocre boards!? And Mode’s running a Black Friday sale, and this amazingly specced-out Sonnet is only $300? And it sounds amazing? All of these boards are sounding great now!?

Okay, I cracked the code: Find stuff from designers you can trust to have a good sound profile. Or find stuff other people have used and sound good and get it for cheaper as a secondhand product.

And that’s my big story. Since then I’ve made this site and added more boards as my collection has grown, and made a handful of boards for others as well. As of (re)writing this in April 2026, shits been fucked for the last couple years because of horrible global policies coming to light and wars being made because a bunch of people can’t admit hypocrisy in their words, so everybody has to suffer. The long-term future of keyboards isn’t totally bleak, but the near future is certainly stunted because of gradually increasing costs, so secondhand will probably be the way to go for a little bit. I also really do hope to expand my repertiore of keyboard designs and get them running, but that goes in parallel with what’s going on with the economy.