Piano for Beginners

Suppose you had decided to learn to play a musical instrument. There may be a few different instruments that interest you. Guitar is popular and easy to play. Violin, if rather more difficult, has a lot of very beautiful music written for it.   And you could also study piano. How would you make the decision? Why should you learn to play keyboard?

I always encourage piano for beginners when first learning an instrument. Piano is a mainstay of almost every style of western music. Whether you are interested in classical, pop, rock, jazz, blues or gospel, you would make a smart decision if you learn to play keyboard.

Unlike most other instruments, piano is polyphonic. That is, you can play more than one note at a time. In fact, by playing a chord with each hand, you can play several notes at once.  This gives the piano a richness that most instruments don’t offer. Even when players first start to learn to play keyboard, polyphonic sound is introduced quite soon. You may only play one note with each hand, but you ordinarily play different notes with each hand. Once a player gets more advanced, the richness in tone is amplified. The complexity of tone available on a piano is unmatched by other instruments.

Piano is a great choice whether you want to go solo or play with others. One the one hand, the literature available for solo piano is breathtaking. On the other hand, it is the standard instrument to accompany voice or flute, violin or any other instrument. Pianos can also be part of a band or orchestra.

Beginning musicians who learn to play keyboard learn a lot about music in general. As a first and obvious example, the music for most instruments is written in either the treble or the bass clef. Piano music is written in the treble clef for the right hand and the bass clef for the left. So piano for beginners offers twice as much music-reading instruction as any other instrument. Playing chords and accompanying the melody (played by the right hand) with the harmony (played with the left hand) offers a student the chance to learn music theory in a very practical way. And piano requires its players to be able to use each finger of both hands independently, causing an improvement in manual dexterity.

Of course, there are some drawbacks if you learn to play keyboard. Pianos are, after all, large and heavy pieces of furniture. They are expensive and not portable. You can’t carry a piano with you to go practice with your band. And some living spaces just don’t accommodate even a small spinet piano.

One work-around to the enormity of an acoustic piano is an electronic keyboard. Since they are small and easier to carry, as well as being significantly more affordable, they may be a good investment for a student to learn to play keyboard. But since they cannot begin to match the sound quality that an acoustic piano provides, a serious piano student will find the need for an acoustic piano before too long.

Of course, the real reason to learn to play keyboard is that the piano is unmatched in beauty. The elegance of a piano cannot be duplicated by any other instrument. Anyone who chooses to learn to play keyboard has made a good choice.

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