Are you sure you are remembering what is allowed correctly? What exactly are you wanting them to do? Here's a few scenario's
A bard is playing 3 songs with an instrument, that's pretty good, but they wont be able to melee then besides throw fist attacks.
A bard can melee and dual wield after 20 but not double attack. Their melee skills are learned extremely late for all of them, and they are generally so poor that an instrument powered Chords of Diss from level 2 outdamages the offset of non instrument melee.
Here's one thing very few people don't know, a three chanting bard with good instrument is on the higher side of average possible DPS among all classes. They are very similar to a melee ranger. A bard charming + 2 chanting two mobs does incredible damage. 3 chanting I think is 75 DPS? It's a pretty nice amount for a hybrid with tons of tools.
All of this ive said is to compound the fact that the bards epic is likely the most powerful and transformative epic in the game, and some people don't understand how serious that is. Getting a high instrument bonus, and the only singing bonus, and opening up a full melee potential is taking the two halves of the class, combining them, and improving them.
If your bard uses its melee weapons without a instrument bonus at lower levels, that can be fine too but they need to select very specific songs to get the most out of that, namely singing only songs. Most other songs become insanely weak when you don't have the instrument. Big examples being Hymn of Resto and Chords of Diss.
At level 6, having a bard twisting just those two songs will far out damage the offset of picking up their single melee weapon.
Really, a lot of the time instruments straight up double songs effects as long as you have the correct type, and don't use the percent gains.
I don't usually use bad language on the forum too often, but I think I once read someone in the not too distant past saying "any bard that melee's is a shitter, unless they have their epic" and I think that's actually a pretty accurate statement.
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