Piano Guidance
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Why learn piano first?

One of the main benefits of learning piano first is that it is easy to make it sound good, even for inexperienced players. As an instrument, the piano is the easiest to dive right into, as it does not require frequent tuning. This allows students to create crisp clear notes simply by pressing a key.

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When a parent is first considering enrolling their child in music lessons, one of the most common questions is “What instrument should they start with?” Piano is an excellent first instrument, providing a solid foundation for your child’s musical education. Learning to play the piano first will provide valuable lessons in music theory, while allowing the child to experience success right from the first lesson. Children whose first instrument is piano will have a leg up on other students when they go on to learn other instruments.

It Sounds Good / Immediate Gratification

One of the main benefits of learning piano first is that it is easy to make it sound good, even for inexperienced players. As an instrument, the piano is the easiest to dive right into, as it does not require frequent tuning. This allows students to create crisp clear notes simply by pressing a key. Even young students can quickly learn to tap out the melody to basic well-known tunes, providing a feeling of success that helps motivate students to keep practicing and playing. (Parents will also appreciate listening to practice sessions that are far more pleasant than beginner wind and string instrument practices often are.)

Piano Provides a Solid Foundation

The piano plays a wide range of notes, with a greater range than any other single instrument. With notes laid out in an intuitive fashion – lower notes on the left, higher notes on the right – and sharp and flat keys easily distinguished, students can easily pick up the early lessons of music theory. Sheet music, in both bass and treble clef, translate very well to the layout of the piano keyboard, giving the student a good foundation in reading music that will later extend to other instruments. Concepts such as whole- and half-steps are much more easily visualized on a piano. The piano also allows students to develop a good sense of pitch. A properly tuned piano will create a perfect sounding note, each and every time. When children start learning to play piano young enough, they can often develop “perfect” pitch, allowing them to easily distinguish notes. This keen ear will help them in many aspects of their musical education and other areas of life.

Improved Coordination

Piano is one of the few instruments that allows the left and right hands to play equally. As students progress they learn to play both the melody and the accompaniment, coordinating their hands and their brains to play two sets of notes at one time. This type of coordination strengthens the hands and the mind, which can serve music students in many areas of life, improving musical performance as well as academic test scores. It also allows students to experience first-hand how the notes and chords come together to form a cohesive piece of music. While other instruments often need to be part of a larger orchestra to create a full-sounding piece, piano can serve as a stand-alone instrument. When choosing an instrument for your budding musician, you can’t go wrong with introducing them to the piano first. Students will enjoy the easy early success of creating music that sounds good, while developing a strong ear, and a solid foundation for their musical education. Music students who begin with piano can easily go on to play any other instrument they desire, already knowing how to read music and understand both bass and treble clefs, as well as important concepts of music theory. Piano makes a great first instrument for anyone interested in learning to play music.

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How many keys is a full size piano?

88 keys By the 1890s, today's modern keyboard had become established with 88 keys spanning 7¼ octaves (from 2A to C5; 27.5 Hz to 4,186 Hz*).

The piano that Bartolomeo Cristofori first invented in Italy had only 54 keys. As piano music developed and evolved, the keyboard compass was gradually expanded in response to requests from composers who sought a broader potential for expression. By the 1890s, today's modern keyboard had become established with 88 keys spanning 7¼ octaves (from 2A to C5; 27.5 Hz to 4,186 Hz*). The human ear can hear sounds in the range from approximately 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz, but the upper limit of frequencies that the human brain can discriminate is at the very most around 4,000 Hz. Even if the compass were to be expanded by increasing the number of keys on the piano, to the human ear, the extra notes at the bass end would become nothing more than a rumbling noise, and the added treble notes would be heard as an unpleasant dissonant noise with no sense of being in a tonal range, and thus, musically, would be almost meaningless. Boesendorfer is making 97-key pianos with nine additional keys in the bass segment of the keyboard (2C to C5). However, the strings for these nine keys in the lowest bass segment are really only there to provide a richer sound when other keys are played by resonating with them. In reality, the extra keys themselves are almost never played directly. * When A is tuned to 440 Hz. The pitch of the individual keys will vary depending on the tuning method.

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