Piano

Piano can be a bit of a solitary instrument. Whereas guitar students often end up jamming and playing with their teachers and peers, piano students often practice and perform alone. This can foster a competitive attitude among pianists and some students can even end up bored. Learning and playing duets is a great way to…

The internet has vast resources for those learning to play music. Students can learn from YouTube, a variety of online courses, and virtual lessons. While all this is helpful, many students still want to learn to read music and be able to play from sheet music. The internet can help with this too! In this…

Pianos come in all shapes and sizes, but they have one thing in common – they are heavy. If you’re thinking about moving a piano, you’d better know how much it weighs. And in this guide, we’ll tell you. First off, if you know the exact model of your piano, you can look up the…

Maintaining a piano in good condition is not complicated. Keep the piano on an inside wall to prevent temperature changes and don’t move it often. Once or twice a year, have a piano tuner do some maintenance and tune the instrument, and you should be all set. But problems do occur. Most commonly, you’ll sit…

Buying a used piano is a good move for most prospective piano owners. Pianos tend to have long shelf lives, especially if they are properly maintained and cared for. Pianos are expensive instruments and moving them around is not easy. You want to be sure you’re buying a good instrument before you shell out cash…

Doing warmup exercises and technique work on piano is not the most exciting part of your piano practice. That’s okay, it doesn’t have to be. Warmup is not the fun part of playing a sport, but it’s still important. Like in sport, the right exercises can help prevent injury and improve overall technique. These exercises…

In the world of high-end pianos, only one brand is a household name the world over. Steinway is to pianos what the Kleenex brand is to tissues. They are almost interchangeable. There is good reason for this – according to figures collected by Steinway, over 98 percent of concert pianists choose to perform on their…

Learning to play piano opens up a whole world of keyboard instruments. Piano skills are transferrable to synthesisers, electric pianos, harpsichord, clavs, and organ. Most of these instruments are pretty similar to the piano – they all involved some sort of percussion on a string to make sound, except the synth and the organ. Synthesizers…

Trying to list the ‘hardest songs ever written’ on any instrument is a difficult task. Everybody has a different perspective on what makes a song ‘difficult’. On the piano, the technique, endurance, and rhythmic/harmonic complexity of these pieces are what earn them their top spots. However, some would argue that a somewhat ‘simpler’ piece can…

One of the hardest parts about practicing piano is that you must have a piano to practice on. Acoustic pianos are not portable, and even digital pianos are often bulky, heavy and expensive. While I was looking into this problem, I came across dozens of virtual, online pianos. These aren’t MIDI keyboards, they are typically…

Having an acoustic piano in your home is a treat. Having to move it is not. Throughout my childhood, I practiced on my grandmother’s 70-year-old upright piano – it didn’t stay in tune and some of the keys had chips in them, which would make my hand bleed. I still loved playing it and whenever…

Enrolling your children in piano lessons will give them the opportunity to develop a skill they will have for the rest of their lives. The gift of a musical education has the potential to enrich their lives for many decades to come, and it has the added benefit of developing discipline, language skills, fine motor…