The way I see it, The Key is to a regular guitar as the Omnichord is to a chorded zither.
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The Key also had technology that allowed you to play along with VHS, Laserdisc, or CDs, and with a 4P4C modular connector the ability to play in conjunction with another Key, but without a manual it is unknown just how this worked. The Key has dozens of preset sounds - mostly guitar or stringed instrument sounds - as well as a canned rhythm, pitch bend, and perhaps its defining feature - the cartridge slot to accept SONGPACS, which allow you to play along with certain songs.
The Key was a single oscillator digital synthesizer with 6-note polyphony. The only other notable musician who was known to have played The Key was Jon Anderson of Yes.ĭespite failing to make it big in the marketplace, The Key was quite innovative for its time and as mentioned before was an early attempt at what the Guitar Hero and Rock Band video games were able to achieve nearly a decade later - create a karaoke instrument.
While he seemed involved with the product, appearing at a charity karaoke-type event in 1995, and with magazines like Popular mechanics buzzing about the new (now 2-year-old instrument), the instrument yet to hit retail shelves and seemed to only be available through mail order.Īn article for the Chicago Tribune cited the price of the guitar at a higher $599 (nearly $200 more than originally advertised) and while expected to hit retail shelves by September, 1995, orders were being taken over phone by calling 1-800-4-THE-KEY, with additional products to be offered depending on success. "The Key" was a very ambitious project and may have been a little ahead of its time”. "The Key" was pretty expensive when it was released and only a few could afford it. We got Jon Anderson from Yes to try out the instrument and he ended up writing a bunch of songs using "The Key". I liked to describe "The Key" as an electronic Autoharp. The "Song Pac" cartridges included midi versions of licensed songs and allowed the user to play an album’s worth of songs on each cartridge. We also developed cartridges called "Song Pacs" that could be plugged into a slot in the instrument and used to accompany the player. "The Key" could also be used as a video "reader" that would allow the user to play along with music videos on encoded video tapes. Chords are formed by pressing different combinations of keys while strumming the "veins". “The Key” could be used as a stand-alone MIDI controller and had it's own internal sound engine. “The Key" had a very futuristic design and by itself is a guitar-like synthesizer, where the "frets" are like keys on a keyboard and the "strings" are made up of synthetic "veins" attached to the body.
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It was a big change for me, going from being a full time musician to doing development for such an innovative company. When interviewed by RCF, Jackson had this to say about The Key: Randy Jackson, of Zebra fame, was involved in the development of the instrument. BusinessWeek called it a "karaoke guitar" and the advertised price was $400 but it didn't really seem to get any traction.
Lonestar President Lawrence Richenstein says the programming used in The Key cartridges can be encoded onto musical laser disks and rock videos for use in karaoke setups, which would allow lounge-singer wannabes to play along while they croon.
Plug in a card, strum the fins, and the device creates the chords for the song you've selected. The Key accepts cartridges that contain song tracks stored in read-only memory. It looks like an electric guitar, but instead of strings, it has six plastic "fins" and white, piano-like keys on the neck. The Hicksville (N.Y.) company has developed an instrument called The Key. Around 1993 stories started to be written about their newest contribution to the music scene - The Key. originated as a karaoke machine manufacturer around 1989 with their Super K karaoke cassette deck that interfaced with home televisions to display lyrics and by 1992 became a leader in the karaoke audiocassette hardware market. Not much information exists explaining these musical oddities.