As a follow-up to my controversial defense of the keytar attempt to get people to stop complaining in comments that they can’t buy a keytar and excuse to needle Roland again.

This is CDM reader Billy Hunt. The bright spot in the upper right hand of the screen is fire — a fireball launched from his keytar. Billy modded his Roland AX-7 for wireless MIDI control (okay, logical, practical choice there) and added a “gun that shoots flash paper” (not so typical).

Billy writes:

It is the best instrument ever. Shooting flames out of your keytar while you use the infared beam to make it squeal like a pig makes the girls want you, and the men want to be you.

Billy is in the band Straight Punch to the Crotch with Buddy — the dummy you see on the right, which itself is MIDI-enabled. Billy describes Buddy as “a midi dummy with drum triggers in his head, shoulders, and (of course) crotch.” I’m hoping Billy will someday present an academic paper at the NIME conference on “Musical Applications of Tactile Sensitive Anatomy Sensing: Dummy Crotch Punching.”

CDM doesn’t very often print retractions, but I think it’s time for one. As a number of you pointed out in hilariously frank fashion, keytars are indeed not cool. So, here’s my Official Correction: flame-shooting keytars are cool — provided they’re in the right hands.

We’ve learned many things through this week’s Keytar Controversy:

1. Keytar aficionados don’t like the term “keytar,” preferring the more-dignified term “strap-on.” This is analogous to the Star Trek fan deciding neither “Trekkie” nor “Trekker” accurately describes their devotion, suggesting instead “penis.”

2. Normal, non-strappable keyboards and pianos actually are cool. Really. You can play keyboards just like that. (Who knew? I thought my piano teachers were trying to tell me something.)

3. In the Chinese and Japanese markets, keytars are preferred by girls. I will extrapolate from this that while I would look really dorky playing a keytar (I don’t own one, despite allegations from readers and bloggers), many girls look super cute with them.

4. Readers here are split between loving and hating the keyta– uh, strap-on. No one has neutral feelings about them. I think that tells you the real reason why they can’t be made any more.

The best part of the debate comes in the blog post Keytars Are Still Lame, with this visual aid:

There’s just one problem. Ray Charles is a great reason to learn the piano. But hand Ray Charles a keytar, and suddenly the keytar is cool. And that’s the point, isn’t it?

I love you, Roland. I really do. But it has to be said:

You’re completely clueless when it comes to the coolest things you’ve ever made.

And if an ordinary keyboard with a silly guitar-style body and shoulder strap can be cool, I’m not sure I can even blame you. You just have to listen to the people.

People love their 303, their 808, even their 909. Yet when these a whole generation of kids desperately wanted you to just re-release these things — or your Jupiter, or Juno, any of your other fantastic keyboards and sound toys of yesteryear — you’ve responded with souped-up, “modernized” versions that mainly share only the name.

But most importantly, you killed the keytar (the awesome, infrared-equipped AX-7) just before everyone decided they really had to have one. So, every week, I hear from people wanting them, just because of I mentioned the keytar in a random post back in April 2005.

Ironically, then, I said, the Keytar Lives. And it does, more than ever — just not in your catalog.

In comments, people sound desperate, hungry — sometimes even poetic. (They sing to the keytar, in Spanish, “ESTOS INSTRUMRNTOS SON GENIALES…..YO TENGO UNO Y LO RECOMIENDO, EL NIVEL DE EXPRESIVIDAD EN VIVO CON ESTA JOYITA ES INCREIBLE….”) Pure poetry.

It’s driven the AX-7 prices sky-high on eBay, though some cheaper items remain of lesser-known and older models. The really lucky people get theirs for fifteen bucks at a yard sale from people who don’t know better.

But why not new units, if they’re this popular? Yamaha — I hope you’re listening, too. Korg? How about a nice, cheap CME version with motorized faders and some band dumping paint on it?

But Don’t Take My Word For It

Take the Times. No, not the New York Times or LA Times - the Times, as in London. The one that gave us Times New Roman.

Velocipede, our friend and inside man in Takarazuka, Japan, has been writing up a storm on the CDM forums, from providing hands-on impressions of Roland’s hand percussion pad to reporting back from Tokyo’s Music Instrument Festival.

The HPD-10 hand percussion controller by Roland could be a terrific controller for synths and clips, from its traditional purpose (drums) to lots of other applications:

My main interest in getting the unit, though, is as a midi control over softsynths. Its 10 pads can be freely assigned to any note numbers on a per kit basis (64 kits can be saved in the unit). So far, I’ve set up different kits for Live’s Impulse, Reason’s Redrum and an Alesis Micron Setup that I have dedicated for drum sounds.

Check out velocipede’s full review:
Handsonic 10 (HPD-10) [Create Digital Noise]

The news from Tokyo’s Music Instrument Festival is mostly what’s going away as what’s new: Alesis selling off the last stock of Ions in Japan, and Roland discontinuing their cult favorite AX-7 strap-on keyboard controller. Fortunately, velocipede dug up two gems. Vestax’s Guber line has some far-out hardware like this crazy-looking turntable:

And from the non-electronic end of the spectrum, the Xaphoon is an original hybrid instrument that packs sax-like sounds in a recorder body; velocipede assures us that it sounds far better than its toy-like looks suggest:

Music Instrument Festival in Tokyo [Create Digital Noise]
Vestax Guber players [Japanese only]
Xaphoon instruments product page

Some people will go to great lengths just to avoid playing scales on a traditional piano-style keyboard. Rick Riday’s apparently Riday T-91 keyboard is immortalized this week on the Matrixsynth blog (via flickr). There’s a discussion of the keyboard there in comments: apparently the keyboard layout is isometric, like the Samchillian and Thummer covered earlier this year. (Note, too, the link to a free QWERTY utility for Windows for trying out your own keyboard layouts.) The effect is a little bit like a peculiar organ adapted for marching band, or a Gothic alt-keytar, but is that a trackball in the corner?

Many people now are rightfully interested more in new instruments that eschew keyboards completely for new interfaces, but there’s something beautiful in all these failed ideas.

If I ran a giant blogging empire like Weblogsinc or Gawker, I’d have to pimp my other sites right now, like “Here’s the hottest news from the Facial Tissues Blog” or something. I’m glad I don’t have such an empire, because instead we can waste productivity looking at this great stuff:

Tiny Tot Synth Lovers: More from the start ‘em young department: Synth recommendations at 18 months [Music thing], and circuit bending at age 6 [Get LoFi] . . . previously on CDM: 3 year-old DJs, child keyboard prodigy

I Want My Synth TV: Theremin videos [Theremin World], BBC Alchemists of Sound documentary [Get LoFi], and in my favorite Web cartoon, Strongbad gets a Key-Sword-Tar [Matrixsynth]

A Very Thereminy Christmas: Like CDM, Theremin World is in a holiday mood with a Christmas tree ornament, and John Waters performing holiday songs with Theremin

But Wait, There’s More! GetLoFi spots synths with tires, and Retro Thing honors the Alesis A6 Andromeda Analog Synth and suggests cheap bookshelf speakers.

Go forth, my children, and make sure that all of us become blocked domain names on your company’s network.

If you thought the “keytar” went out with other 80s fads like legwarmers, think again. Roland not only still makes keytars, they’ve actually upgraded the tech. It seems some keyboardists still don’t want to be exiled behind a wall of keyboards while the guitarists get all the babes. “Just strap it on and you’re front-of-stage with the band,” says Roland. (At least, I HOPE they’re talking about the keytar.)

The modern Roland AX-7 has a General MIDI/GS soundbank (I love the 90s, too!), 45-note keyboard, touch controller, expression bar, and — here’s the nifty part — infrared “D Beam” sensors so you can wave your hands in the air in front of it. Just in case you needed your keytar to be MORE geeky. Because it’s not the 80s anymore, though, the keytar now scores a kitsch factor, and that’s priceless.