Splatfest Asks Us: Which Would you Play? Drums, Guitar, or Keyboard?

Another Splatfest is here, and of course brings with it, the hardest questions anyone can ask. Such as what kind of chocolate or ice cream you prefer. This time around, the moral conundrum it presents is with which instrument you would prefer to play in a rock band: drums, guitar, or keyboard? A question that is phrased with a lot more layers of personal preference than your usual Splatfest question, but these are Splatfests we're talking about here. And with Splatoon 3 being effectively my first Splatoon game, my VERY experienced opinion is that Splatfests are about picking audacious and absurd hills to die on, so of COURSE I gotta ask myself: which is the clear, objective best answer here??? And who better to ask this question than a plural system of funny animals that knows next to nothing about music other than "it sounds nice"?

We start with a strong contender in drums, out of these choices easily being the most culturally significant instrument, just by proxy of it being the one that goes the furthest back in human history, some of the first skin drums dating back to 5500 BCE. Drums, while in the background of most music, do quite often form the beat of a song, something that is more or less the backbone of a lot of music. A background element, but a very essential one. Even modern drums have very identifiable sound bites, such as the famous Amen Break, which in and of itself spawned its own subgenre of electronic music.

Of course, none of this is getting into just how accessible drumming is. All you really need to drum is an appendage for whacking things with (or in many such cases, hold a whacking impliment), and and literally any object that can produce even a vaguely musical sound. The bigger and echoey the better. A lot of us drum on things when we're bored probably without even realizing it, it's just something that comes that naturally to us. But nonetheless, drumming has a high skill ceiling that makes good drumming no less impressive.

The main sacrifice you make for drums is quite often a spot on the limelight. Drums CAN be the centerpiece of a song, but they're so busy being a song's skeleton, especially with modern music, that they, at best, end up with a drum solo. Especially since the question this Splatfest is asking is pertaining to a rock band.

What is often taking up said limelight in rock music is the guitar. Guitars and their ancestors still go back quite far in human history, so they still have plenty of cultural clout, but tend to be more relevant in the landscape of modern music because they so often make up the main melody of a song. They're loud, ludicrous, and nothing hardly beats the lustrous deliciousness of a riling guitar riff.

They may just be the instrument with the highest skill floor of this trio. Not to mention it's hard to guitar with anything that isn't a guitar, which are pretty universally expensive as hell. Unless of course you have one made of air lying around, which, points for trying.

Though it's hard to deny that one of, if not THE biggest defining characteristic of rock IS the electric guitar. And rock in and of itself was at the center of some pretty big cultural shifts in the 60s-80s. Back when simply listening to rock music was rebellious behavior, thanks to Christian Conservative parents calling it "devil's music" (which is a plus in guitar's favor, obviously, because that only makes it sound COOLER.) It's a significance that has faded as rock music has become more normalized over the years, but it's still a permanent mark in history for that reason. And nonetheless, rock has more than proven its staying power, spawning many, many branches on the music evolutionary tree.

Not to mention guitar just has an inherent cool factor to it. It just has a rad sound to it, and so many kids and teens fantasized about being rock stars in the 90s and 2000s that it's the sort of thing that made Guitar Hero such a hit. Electric guitar is still perhaps the least versatile of these instruments, but it still covers a lot of moods.

That leaves us with keyboard, easily the most modern of all the instruments, it only really using piano keys as shorthand for an instrumental input method we're already familiar with. The electronic keyboard is vastly the most versatile of the instruments, since it can do a hell of a lot more than just replicate a piano. With the right sound samples, an electronic keyboard can fill in for basically ANY instrument you can imagine. It can even imitate the other two instruments! The one downside being it can't quite replicate these instruments flawlessly, which is probably why keyboards are regulated to synth duty, making sounds that no traditional instrument can make.

And that isn't even getting into how accessible it is. While maybe not as readily available as anything that could ever possibly be made into a makeshift drum, they can be relatively cheap compared to guitars and all the needed guitar accessories. The biggest learning curve can be figuring out how to get the thing set up, but it's still as simple as playing a piano, a process made even easier if you already know how to play piano. Again, it's not quite as simple as just beating a drum, playing any instrument WELL is a learning curve, but it has much less physical barriers than holding, balancing AND strumming a guitar. Beyond that, it's an instrument where the world is very much your oyster. So is that it? Does modernity win? This super technological omni-instrument?

Well, songs are a composite medium. It's hard to make a song with just one instrument, at least not without being very minimalist with it. So in a lot of ways, asking what instrument is best is a lot like asking what's the best part of a piece of art: the colors, composition, or the subject? Art is a sum of its parts, after all, and music is just as much a medium of art as anything else humans create.

But of course, I have to pick ONE team, there's no "all of the above" option for smartasses like me. SO: I'm a big fan of 2000s Sonic, which has some of the sickest guitar music known to man in it, so I got loyalties to lay there. Besides, poor Frye could be thrown a bone or two.