Becoming a Musician: Should You Become a Piano Player?

It’s nine o’clock on a Saturday, and you’ve been itching to learn something new. Crochet might be a little out of the picture, you need something that says, “you wanna see something cool” when people notice. Perhaps an instrument could be interesting. Drums would be awesome, but the neighbors might disapprove. The guitar seems pretty neat, but there’s just so much that goes into it and you’re just not sure how you feel about it. Then one night you think of it and hey wait a minute! You know what you can do with that empty space in the house, you could get a piano!

“That’s what you’re going with. A piano..”. Your significant other or parent will say to you but don’t worry, they’ll warm up to the idea after you’ve practiced for six months. Much like guitar, I’d say the piano is probably the most versatile way to learn just about any song. You aren’t limited in notes sounds like you are a bass guitar, and it doesn’t have a specific sound that can throw off the notes sounds like bagpipes. The piano has a natural calming or uplifting tone, it can produce such powerful sound that it’s hard to not be moved even when it’s a simple jingle. As someone who can play only two or three songs on the piano, I always enjoy hopping on someones for a sec to play and even if they don’t know the song, they’re still vibing along with me.

That brings me to my next point, notice how I said only a few songs. I will be the first to tell you, that I am not a piano player. I just love music and thought it would be fun to learn something on a piano. I’m not going to say the piano is easy, however, I will say it seems to be easily approachable. The only part that I can think of that would hinder someone’s ability to play is if they have small hands, but my hands are the smallest male hands I’ve ever seen, and I can still reach an octave from thumb to pinky. A piano is nice because you don’t have to go through the rough time of making callouses on your fingers to play effectively like you do on guitar. You just press a key, and you have a note. The same can be said about chord shapes. Chords, which are three notes or more played together are so much easier to do on a piano. You’re not paying the cost of painful fingers, just training your brain some muscle memory.

Speaking of cost, let me tell you one of my favorite parts about piano. If you want to see something cool, go on your local craigslist or FaceBook Marketplace and look up pianos. Immediately, you’ll see “free piano” and pianos for $1oo or less everywhere. A large amount of those need to be tuned by someone, but that’s still numerous people just giving a piano away. Now alright, let’s say you live in an apartment on the 13th floor, and you don’t have room for a piano. That’s why they made a keyboard. You can learn the same muscle memory and piano skills on a keyboard while you’re sitting on your bed. Not to mention, if you get a keyboard you’ll more than likely be able to make it play multiple sounds instead of just piano key sounds.

The piano is a really fun instrument to play or even just to mess around on. Maybe you play the piano already and you read this just to see my reasons to play it. What would you add? leave me a comment and let me know and if you like this post be sure to follow me to stay up to date on the new material I may post!