For those of you who took/take piano lessons.

Would you say it helped a lot in you being a better musician?

yes it turned me into a brilliant composer

It realy helps build basic knowledge for every other musical thing you want to do.

But hey, look at Rdj, he never got any piano lessons...

no it made me hate my parents and now i'm a drug addict

  BoomTssPhace said:

Would you say it helped a lot in you being a better musician?

Yes. Even if, like me, you only have lessons for a year and then go on to play guitar instead of piano, the theory helps.

you know there's a whole forum for questions like this.

Which is where this thread is gonna get moved as well.

  zaphod said:

no it made me hate my parents and now i'm a drug addict

Did they make you take piano lessons too?

  chenGOD said:

you know there's a whole forum for questions like this.

 

Which is where this thread is gonna get moved as well.

Well, no one goes to EKT. Everyone knows that.

I never took piano lessons, but I played oboe, and I played keyboard percussion for 2 years. I practice piano around 1-5 hours a day when I get the chance.

eh, slightly but I'm sure the effect is different on children than for adults. A little of both I'm sure is very beneficial.

  Yegg said:

  zaphod said:

no it made me hate my parents and now i'm a drug addict

 

Did they make you take piano lessons too?

uh huh

Typical, sad.

it made me more musical but sadly it did not help me that much when composing music. i took lessons for ten years...... never theory though, by choice though... that's where i went wrong. it was a private teacher and i really didn't enjoy theory so i learnt how to play piano without getting to know the notes on a personal level. i gots good at playing though i did that much i say

Damn, it helped a lot really.

having a bit of experience with piano made it a lot easier to start making elektronique muzics

Ive only taken 2 semesters of intro keyboard lessons... I didnt take them too seriously at the time. For me, a piano isn't so much about being able to sit down and play stuff... but more to visualize intervals, and patterns and ranges etc. Only a veryyyyy small percentage of my music is based on something I played on the keyboard.

If I could be better at it, I'd love it, but I enjoy my method for writing right now, and I dont want to put the time in on practicing piano, when I could be writing instead.

In someways Im glad I didnt play an instrument when I started writing music... I used my ears, more than my muscle memory.

In general though, its a good skill, and I reccomend it to anyone who is interested/dedicated enough to do it.

What I really reccomend though, is theory... def more useful than keyboard skills

piano helped with chords and scales, guitar helped with chord progression. i can't read sheet music for shit though.

  zaphod said:

no it made me hate my parents and now i'm a drug addict

lol. my parents made me take them as well. i disliked it at first, now i cant thank them enough.

i think everyone's pretty much hit it on the head but i think it's far more important to stress the mental temperament from having piano lessons in the difference between musical diligence and curiosity/experiment. nowadays i can barely remember how to play anything (aside from stairway to heaven) but can improvise in most keys and play along to anything after a moments observation - i had lessons in a keyboard shop with about 4 others, meaning most of the lesson was 'headphones on' practice time which would instead be spent experimenting with the various keyboards (the shit hot 'triton' if i was lucky). i think the lessons help you musically adapt but most importantly its sheer experimentation and childlike curiosity which ultimately make you better a better musician - and it resonates throughout the whole music-making process because for all the synthesizer manuals/music tech magazine tutorials you read or in the case of piano, songs you diligently learn note by note and scales you memorize, this all pales in comparison to twisting the knobs, observing, learning things by ear and just twinkling out notes and patterns.

this is all very relevent to this weekend - i made a new electronic music friend! probably shouldve guessed from the facial hair but i thought he was another random local who'd come back to my house for some bongs. turned out after i started playing some music that he knew of aphex, 'pusher etc.. and promptly began playing drukqs on the piano, which naturally caused involuntary wang activation. but my enthusiasm quickly ebb'd as it was very robotic, and whilst dueting he could not improv anything, that for all his skills he couldnt just "play in c minor" and instead i was left to playing along to various diligently learnt piano dittys. i thought that for an electronic music fan/potential EKT'r he would've at least twinkled around a few times, had a few piano dittys of his own but it was not so. just seemed like he had a reel of backed up songs in his head.

in regards to making specifically electronic music/expeirmental music, the piano in the first place is probably not too helpfull. the 12 note scale being the basis of music is (forgive the melodramatic phrasing) a lie that western culture has conformed to. many of my favourite musicians had no conventional musical upbringing, infact many of them had very unconventional ones. having piano lessons or any formal musical lesson i think is tainting a blank canvas... its like placing a bunch of acrylic paints next to the canvas or at worst drawing on a paint by numbers landscape scene. yeah, you're gonna end up with a nice painting to hang in the kitchen but it couldve been a crazy surreal cubist masterpiece (COOL METAPHOR, YEH?). yet still, the 12 note scale, ie. the piano is still the basis for pretty much everything, or at least a good starting point. whilst the discipline of playing the piano can limit your thinking, and whilst this can be said for the tools too, you dont have to paint within those lines, it's just a case of making a bigger a conscious effort not to.

...

what? i know you're usaully a smarmy git, so just get it over and done with if you dont like what i wrote.

smarmy? haha

safe mate.

you just seem to like to hear yourself talk, which is fine... but by the time I finished reading your response, I just didn't know what you were talking about/your point.

theory=very useful. learning to play an instrument (or a few) helps with knowing how to orchestrate for "real" instruments.

I took many years of piano lessons, and i enjoyed them a lot. Clearly they're not for everyone. But it's nice to be able to sit down and sight-read stuff.