I love Peter Kirn's blog, but today he posted some crazy shit and I have to call him out on it.

In a story titled Keytar Komeback: You Don’t Love It Until It’s Gone, An Open Letter to Roland, Peter tries to convince Roland that the keytar has become cool again. Primarily citing the rising price of keytars on ebay, he argues that there is new demand for the defunct instrument.

I'm sorry, but this is just not true. I'm sure there is a niche retro community out there who likes unique hardware, and is embracing the keytar much like they embrace the melodica. Still, both the melodica AND the keytar suffer from the same basic problems that make them permanently uncool (although not necessarily un-fun).

The design principal behind the keytar is to combine the versatility of a keyboard with the look of a guitar, in the hopes of getting the best of both instruments. Sadly, what you end up with the exactly the opposite. You get neither the coolness of the guitar, nor the versatility of the keyboard.

First, with keytars, you are limited to playing with one hand. This limits the keyboardist to either solos, or rhythm parts. Right there, you lose a ton of the expressivity of a traditional keyboard, which can go from playing a single melodic line to emulating a full orchestra in the blink of an eye.

Secondly, even with the one hand that a keytarist can use, they can't play as well with it as they could on a traditional keyboard. I can attest to this personally, but this is also a function of the fact that every keyboard player learns to play on a traditional keyboard. As such, they have far more practice with a traditional setup than they do with the awkward, half-standing position that they have to assume in order to play a keytar.

In short, a keytar performance can almost never be as expressive, or technically brilliant as a performance on a traditional keyboard. So, the only possible reason to use a keytar is for the look. To rebut the argument that keytars look cool, I will simply present two pictures.

As you can see, there is no good reason to play, or purchase a keytar, outside of nostalgia or curiosity. Promoting keytars is dangerous and irresponsible. It not only hurts keyboard players, but also their families and friends. Further, I suggest that we create a 'keytar watch list' to keep track of the dangerous, unbalanced individuals who like them. Name #1: Peter Kirn.

;)

UPDATE:

CDM Posted a subtle update to the original article, with pics of a keytar flamethrower. Yes, you read that correctly.