Synthesizer guitar

When synthesizers got introduced into the music world, most people were interested but it seemed at first that synthesizers would just fill in some void and all other instruments would stay as popular as they were. The growing popularity of the synthesizers culminated in the eighties of the twentieth century, where most new music went electronic and almost no regular instruments were used, bass guitar got replaced by the analog bass from a Moog synthesizer, drum machines made the drummer obsolete. Guitar players got scared and many of them looked for a way to transport their music knowledge into the new medium.
Today every single one of the guitar heroes would deny that any scare was the reason why they went on to experiment with the new technology, but they all have seen that Edward Van Halen, the great guitar player, employed synthesizers on the album "1984" and that the rock band Queen, prominently stating that no synthesizers have been used in making their records, suddenly employed them without a warning. It was not until the grunge movement stemming from Seattle and the group Nirvana in the nineties that guitars would receive a comeback and the scare would blow over. With the scare went the guitar synthesizers as well.
But in the short time, a little more than a decade, synthesizer guitars were the latest necessity and thousands of guitar players yearned after a solution that would let them play a keyboard by means of a guitar. Thankfully a standardized protocol for keyboard and synthesizer control was established already, the Musical Instrument Digital Interface, or MIDI. All that was needed to make a guitar hero into a keyboard playing guitar hero was an interface that would either be based on a guitar, or translate the guitar play into MIDI signals. Sounds easy? Well it was never sufficiently well enough accomplished.
The Roland Corporation, a synthesizer and keyboards producing company that lagged behind the market leaders, managed to beat everybody to the punch with the GR-500, the first ever guitar synthesizer that was available for purchase. The year was 1977, there was no MIDI yet, and a perfectly good guitar needed to be sacrificed to the Roland techs in order to build in the electronics making the CV/GATE output to the synthesizer module. It was not perfect, but many people bought it, like Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin or Mike Rutherford of Genesis. SynthAxe was the first MIDI controller that had strings and frets, but no guitar sound output, only a MIDI cable as an output. Most other solutions involved a piezo crystal device that worked as a hexaphonic pickup and translated the played guitar sounds directly to MIDI.