Steve Masakowski isn't sure how he got credited as the father of the keytar.

More than 100 Web sites have given the respected jazz guitarist and University of New Orleans professor this distinction - with most of them cutting and pasting from the Wikipedia entry that states "The keytar was developed by Steve Masakowski and commercially introduced in 1980 as the Moog Liberation."

Masakowski did invent something called the "key-tar" - he has patent papers from the early 1980s to prove it - but it looks more like something that Jimmy Page played in "The Song Remains the Same" than the keytar wielded by members of Devo and Thomas Dolby.

"The thing that (Moog) came up with was a piano instrument that you hold like a guitar. The thing I came up with was a guitar that had keys," Masakowski says. "I built this instrument as a guitar instrument, except at every fret string location I made a little key that was totally independent. I hardwired it to a Moog polyphonic synthesizer, and I called it the key-tar."

Mostly, Masakowski is amused by the confusion. He's always tinkered with instruments, and plays a seven-string guitar of his own design in his band Astral Project. He says his key-tar was damaged during Hurricane Katrina, but still works. He's thinking about taking it out for a one-time-only gig.

Incidentally, his daughter is in a band - and her keyboardist plays a keytar.

"Sometimes I'll play the guitar with them and someone will announce, 'Hey this is the guy who invented the keytar,' " Masakowski says. "But that's not the thing I invented. I invented the thing that I built."

So who invented the first commercial keytar? Robert Moog, who worked closely on the release of the first keytar, died four years ago. We did, however, receive an e-mail from someone named Lesley Symons, just hours after a blog post mention of our intentions to interview Masakowski.

"I've noticed that you are going to interview some of the so-called 'inventors' of the Keytar at some time soon," Symons wrote, explaining that she developed the keytar with her brother in 1977, and tried unsuccessfully to sell it to manufacturers - who went ahead and made the instrument anyway.

"I also invented the word 'Keytar' too," she said. "But unfortunately, we couldn't afford to protect the name at the time."

While she says she would like to set the record straight, Symons said she's "heartened" by the fact that bands including Lady Gaga and the Black Eyed Peas have brought the instrument back.