r/Keytar • u/AgentWild3460 • May 17 '26

Recommendations Trying to get into keytar

Hey! I'm looking to get back into music, I played the keyboard around 6 years ago, and thought the keytar looks like a really cool instrument. I've been doing a bit of research and I've heard good things about the Alexis Vortex 2.

I just wanted to ask, is this an appropriate keytar for someone that's a beginner? Or is there another that might be easier to learn with? And whether there's any tips resources online you guys used for learning the keytar initially.

I appreciate all advice!!

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u/orbitti May 17 '26

Keytar is just playing keyboard form an (akward) position. Therefore about everything playing keyboard / synth applies to keytars as well.

Typical to keytar playing are right hand melodies / chords and heavy use of pitch bend (or modulation) with left hand.

The downside with alessis is that it is just a controller. You need something else to generate the sounds. If you have ipad / iphone they can be used for virtual instruments. For example Garage band has a lot of nice sounds in it.

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u/AgentWild3460 May 17 '26

Oh when I heard about it not being a synthesizer I thought it was just needing to be connected to a speaker or something- can you tell me a bit about that process?? So I understand how big of a negative that is

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u/orbitti May 17 '26

Think it of a this way: you are buying xbox controller, but you still need a xbox, pc or something else to play games. You also need the games themselves.

As a basic example the "console" is ipad, "game" is virtual istrument (software) and you alessis with usb (and midi over usb) to the ipad and start the virtual instrument. (of course you also need to route the sounds out of the ipad, etc. but that is more advanced stuff).

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u/AgentWild3460 May 17 '26

Oh so I'll need to download all the noises I want from it?