h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

My favourite 'basic' instrument is the piano. Learning to play the piano (with a teacher and with real written music!) will teach you how to read music in the two predominant clefs. You will develop independence of both hands.

The piano still is the standard instrument for many (most?) composers.

The biggest problem, however, is space. A piano is a really *BIG* instrument. Those more or less little digital pianos might be a solution, but not a really good one.

If you want to be a travelling musician, don't go for the guitar or the flute. Go for the instrument that causes no transportation problem at all: Church organ

Jeremy

I agree the piano is a great instrument, with a lot of music available is all styles. I have a console Kawai that sounds great. But I think some of the small portable options are also pretty good. With advances in computer and sampling technology, they can sound pretty convincing. One example is a software sampler "Unity DS-1" that runs on my laptop (450 MhZ mobile Pentium3) with great sound and virtually no "latency" (delay between striking a key and hearing a sound). I can hook up a small "controller" keyboard (4 octaves, no sounds) with a MIDI interface and have a fairly realistic grand piano sound in a total weight of around 10 pounds. Plus a lot of other sounds, like church organ, or Hammond B3, or ...

I happened to have a somehow similar discussion with a friend of mine (who plays the piano for a living).

If you are a travelling musician, it's a *MUST* to have the option to take all your gear to the gig (except for church organ players ). For a piano player that means that you have to have some decent digital piano with some decent amplification.

Technology is that excellent today that in most cases it's easier and more predictable to use a digital piano (or a masterkeyboard/sampler configuration) than trying to do it with the real thing. Especially if you have to amplify it anyhow. You'll get a 80% to 90% perfect sound without the hassle of hauling, tuning, microphoning a grand or upright piano; in my experience it's really hard to beat the sound of a digital piano with a real one. Buying the required set of microphones (example: 2-3 AKG C414 B-TL II) and mic preamps might cost you more than a really good digital piano.

But back to the discussion: We were talking about what instrument to start with. In my very personal experience the piano is the right instrument. I started with the flute (wooden flute, recorder (?)) and switched to the piano some months later). Retrospectively I have to say that the flute was just some kind of musical toy, whereas the piano was an excellent tool for musical education. I had four years of rather tough piano lessons. These years tought me to read and write music in both keys which is a skill that I'm very thankful to have.

I don't play the piano anymore (I don't have one where I live), but I started to use one of those 4-octave midi keyboards to enter music into my notating software.

My personal conclusion: Some rudimentary piano lessons should be part of any musical education.

Jeremy