Well, the only place I could find that sells them is ebay. I have been looking for quite a while. No one makes these things anymore. If you want the new Roland AX-7(was still in production last year) be prepared to pay, they go for more than a thousand dollars now. There are older models available for cheaper. Unfortunately the world is a dire place for people who want to own keytars.
A friend of mine who plays in a church has two or three, he said he could sell me one, I'll just need to get some money and see what kind of keytar is. That's some bas news, the guys in Guitar Center told me that the Roland AX7 is discontinued. I want a new one, but I guees I'll have to buy a uded one. Do I need something more to play with a keytar? I read that I need somekind of module and an amp of course. Whats a module? What does it do? Why do I need it? How much does it cost? Are there effects pedals for keyboards and keytars like guitar ones?
It depends on the keytar. Basically, you get ones with built in sound, and ones which are just midi-controllers, which basically mean you have to hook them up to something else that can make sounds, such as a keyboard or rack module. You can probably just plug pedals into the rack or keyboard. Some keytars like the AX-7(which is just a controller) has a pitch-bend controller. I'm pretty sure most can act as midi controllers though. But yeah, find out what model you can get and research them on the internet.
Thanks, I'll ask my friend what are the models he has. Could I plug the Roland AX7 to this?: http://www.guitarcenter.com/DigiTech-RP350-Guitar-Multi-Effects-Processor-103952164-i1169084.gc Its for guitar, would it work? I pluged my Digitech RP80 (for guitar) with my keyboard and then to the amp and it sounded ok.
From what I can tell about the RP80, it just alters analog audio input with effects, which means it's useless to midi controllers. Midi-controllers send digital data, think of it like sheet music about what to play instead of actual sound being played. Synths and sound modules recieve the midi signals and generate the sound according to what is recieved. If you get a keytar that generates it's own sound, or output the analog out from another synth or sound modules to which you have the midi-controller connected to you can use the RP80's effects on that. I don't know alot about all the keytar models available, but I think most of the newer ones support midi-out, while older ones have their own sounds(which would probably by very limited given the size and age of them).
Well if it's a midi controller you have a few options. Basically they all fall in the "external sound generator module" category, basically synths and samplers. A synth generates and modifies a base 'wave' signal to create instrument sounds and more electronica sounding stuff. The more powerfull the synth the better quality the sound and the wider variety of tweakability you will have. A sampler is basically a recording of notes. There are many different ways in which they work, some only record a note for each octave and transpose those notes up and down to complete the whole sound range. More advanced ones record each note at different volumes and playing styles and incorporate post processing to create professional quality sounds. The line is somewhat blurry, since a synth uses base waves(usually generated samples) to modify it to a great extent, and samplers focus more on having better quality samples and focus less on modifying the sounds. Synths need less memory but more processing power, samplers need more memory but more processing power. Probably more than you need to know. Anyway, usually high end keyboards like workstations comes with both, although in modern use "sampler" means more the ability the record your own samples as opposed to the sound samples that already ship with the keyboard. I generally refer to these things as 'sound modules'. You can find them in keyboards(duh ), computers(with the proper software, although there might be slight delays when playing depending on your pc) and rack modules(usually, the sound modules in keyboards but without a keyboard attached). They come in various colours and sizes(metaphorically), and I don't know that much about them, so it's better to ask others on the forums.
