Pianos, Electric pianos, and keyboards

[A new look for this post!! Hee hee!]

If you don't have a musical family tradition, and you have a musical child, or even if you have a child with unknown potential, you could be easily intimidated by the prospect of getting started with an instrument.  How to proceed?

There are two objectives you could have: (1) general musicianship, and (2) learning an instrument.

(1) General Musicianship:  In a good school district, with a competent music teaching team (or even a single good music teacher), the child's musical development should be in good hands. It is a travesty that this can't be assumed as a given in this day and age. If absolutely necessary, a piano teacher will provide excellent general musicianship; in fact, I would go so far as to suggest that even if a child takes up some melodic instrument, like violin or flute, it makes sense to give them a couple of years of piano anyway.

What I call general musicianship is (a) getting familiar with mainstream traditional music, such as folk-songs, group songs, chorus singing (even "The more we are together" type songs are better than nothing!), and listening to classics, such as Peter and the Wolf, or excerpts from Bach, etc.  If a teacher isn't available, you could organize this sort of thing yourself, with the help of DVDs or the TV.  (b) Group singing.  Every child should have the chance to try to sing in a group. A church setting is okay, if that's your scene, or school, or any such thing.  (c) The rudiments of theory and musical notation.  A year of this is enough to be considered general musicianship, or even one summer of it.  If the kid is interested, you could always follow on with something the following year.  Teachers are understandably unhappy with this sort of interrupted training, so depending on how sympathetic you are to the needs of the music teacher, you could choose to send your kid more often, provided the kid, of course, is willing.

(2) Learning an instrument: Not everyone wants to learn an instrument, nor does everyone want their kid to do so.  If you do, you could choose piano and something else, or piano, or something else.  I would encourage the two instrument approach, if you can afford it, and your youngster has the motivation; otherwise, any instrument is fine.

Piano: For traditional instruments, you have to be guided by the teacher's preferences.  A piano teacher, one of the more traditional ones, will insist on your buying a conventional piano.  A spinet model is all you need, and they run about $3000.  You can rent for a hundred or so a month (or maybe less), or get a used one.  Something less than 15 years old is best; pianos do not improve with age.  Though there's no guarantee that your young person will become a musical genius, access to a piano during childhood is such a fabulously enriching thing that if you can afford it at all, you should go for it.  Warning: if you can't stand noise, and you can't stand kids plunking on the piano, maybe you should give the whole thing up.  If you have a silent piano in the house, the whole purpose has been defeated.  The point is for the kid to play the damn thing, so you have to be ready to take the noise.

Electric keyboards, and Digital Pianos.  For general musicianship, these two sorts of instruments are perfectly acceptable.  An electric keyboard (or synthesizer) can be bought for around $100, and a digital piano from $500 and on up to $3000.  The expensive ones mimic the feel of a traditional piano very well, to the point that practicing on one will enable one to play a real piano.  (Practicing on an electric keyboard will not build the finger strength required to play conventional piano properly with good form and --don't be surprised-- endurance.  Playing the piano requires muscle training, and electric keyboards will not provide it, but the best digital pianos could.)  Some traditional piano teachers will reluctantly live with the student practicing on a good digital piano.

On the plus side, Digital pianos have lots of sound effects, so that the young musician can be more easily persuaded to spend time playing the thing.  The same is true with electric keyboards.  My $200 Casio has some 500 different 'voices', such as violin, and oboe, and organ.

(Why are they called "synthesizers?  It used to be the case that earlier models would synthesize a tone-color by blending artificially generated wave-forms, such as square waves, sawtooth waves, and sine waves.  Modern synthesizers work with sampled tones from actual instruments; that is, a note from an actual piano, or violin or orchestra is recorded, analyzed and stored in the instrument.  The Mellotron, used by the Beatles in Sgt Pepper, did exactly this with tape loops, but now it's done at the factory using digital recordings.)

If there is a possibility that your youngster might be a serious amateur or professional musician, then you might consider an instrument such as a violin, flute, saxophone, or trumpet.  These are actually portals for more useful instrument playing:

A student starting with a violin can switch to a viola, cello, or double bass.  A student starting with flute could progress to oboe, clarinet, English horn, or bassoon; a student starting with trumpet could take up horn, or possibly trombone, tuba, or any of the numerous brass instruments that are featured in orchestras and brass ensembles.  Saxophones provide a door into a tradition of jazz music.  The whole idea is to make it possible for the child to play in an instrument ensemble someday, if the inclination is there.  There is, of course, no guarantee that this will happen, or even that the kid will ever be interested.  But if interest awakens in college, for instance, it might just be too late.

A wonderful ensemble instrument is, of course, the lowly recorder.  If you are so lucky as to have an adult in your community who can guide a young recorder ensemble through its early stages, you can have junior playing in a recorder ensemble right away.  (The Suzuki folk know the power of ensemble playing to motivate kids, and ensemble playing is a mainstay of the Suzuki method.)

A guitar is always a possible choice, even in addition to another instrument. Guitars are light and travel well, and it's possible to acquire quite a lot of general musicianship via a guitar, which has happened in our family.  I was first turned onto the potential of the simple nylon-strung folk guitar by the film The Sound of Music (which has inspired many), and by the writings of Maria von Trapp herself, who called it an orchestra in a box.  Especially for the musically inclined youngster with wide interests and a liking to travel, a guitar is an excellent companion on any trip.

One of these days, they'll invent a folding keyboard that fits inside your suitcase (and if you do, I want credit), and then a guitar will have some serious competition as the instrument of choice of the wandering minstrel!

Last, and most certainly least, is of course a ukulele.  They're not as cheap as you would expect: $80 is about what an inexpensive one would cost.  They come in different sizes, from Baritone, all the way down to Sopranino.  I have left out other instruments such as harmonicas and bagpipes, but they're any one of them better than a home without any musical instrument at all!

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