The keytar's ancestors reach back to a Viennese strap-on piano of 1795
The keytar looks like pure 1980s excess, but its lineage starts with the orphica, a small portable piano made in Vienna in 1795 and held much the same way. The idea was simple and durable: free keyboard players from their stands so they can roam the stage like guitarists.
A keytar is a keyboard slung from a strap round the neck and shoulders, with a guitar-like neck carrying controls for pitch bends, vibrato, portamento and sustain. Some contain their own synthesizer; others are MIDI controllers that trigger sounds on external gear, and in principle they can fire lighting rigs or effects units too. Either way, it needs an amplifier or PA to be heard.
Precursors kept surfacing. The piano accordion appeared in 1852, an East German firm built a keytar-shaped electric bass piano called the Basset in 1963, and a Swedish company made the Tubon, a tube-shaped organ played by Kraftwerk and Paul McCartney. Edgar Winter strapped on keyboards in the early 1970s, though without a neck they did not truly count. Purpose-built instruments followed from the late 1970s: the Hillwood RockeyBoard, the Syntar, the Clavitar used by Herbie Hancock and George Duke, and the Probe that Jan Hammer helped develop and wielded in the Miami Vice theme video.
The Moog Liberation of 1980 is usually counted as the first mass-produced strap synthesizer, and the word keytar reached print that year in a magazine interview. Glam metal, synthpop and new wave made it a stage fixture through the decade, and Prince received a design patent in 1994 for his own ornamental model, the PurpleAxxe. Devo, despite the association, only used one in videos and adverts. After fading in the 1990s it came back in the late 2000s with No Doubt, the Black Eyed Peas, Flight of the Conchords and a Snoop Dogg video.
Oddly, no big manufacturer put the word keytar on a product until 2012, when Alesis launched the Vortex with built-in drum pads and a tilt sensor, even though Roland had shipped USB models three years earlier.
Source: Keytar
