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- Keyboards for Beginners
Keyboards for Beginners
The piano is one of the most common instruments that people learn. It's not surprising, either — even young children have the ability to learn, and the piano can be used for many different styles of music.
The invention of the digital piano and keyboards, however, has made the piano a much more accessible instrument. Along with being less expensive, digital pianos and keyboards are much easier to maintain. Acoustic pianos require routine, professional tuning and other maintenance.
Whether you want to learn the piano to work on your music theory, improve your aural skills, use it for music production or just enjoy it as a hobby, the keyboards are a great instrument to learn.
Keyboard Basics
When you learn any new thing, you have to get through a learning curve Here are a few basic skills you'll learn first with keyboards:
- The correct positioning — making your chair the right height, your body's position, the position of your hands over the keys
- Learning which keys are which notes, including sharps and flats
- Practicing scales and how to recognize different key notations
- Learning basic notation and rhythms
- Adjusting to make your hands do two separate things at one time
The key to learning anything new-to-you is practice. As you put more time in, you get more out. With most of these skills, they will eventually become second-nature. Later on, these skills will help you take on more and more complex music.
More and more people are self-teaching themselves to play instruments. But, if you can, take music lessons from a professional to really help you develop a strong foundation for the piano. Your teacher will catch any bad habits that you might develop when you're learning by yourself.
Choosing Your Starter Keyboards
While you're shopping for a starter keyboard, here are some things to keep in mind:
- Size: A keyboard's size is typically determined by how many keys it has. Keyboards usually have 37, 49, 61, 76 or 88 keys. If you need a greater range, you should get a larger keyboard.
- How you'll use it: If you want a keyboard to help you train your ear, a smaller, simpler keyboard is just fine. But if you want to use it to produce music down the road, you should invest in a more complex keyboard. Pay for the features that you need but not for the ones that you'll never use.
At Bananas at Large®, we have the selection and expert staff to help you figure out how to buy a beginner's keyboard. Check out our inventory online or stop into one of our two locations in the San Francisco Bay Area.