Many parents give up on their children’s piano lessons because preparing the instrument and its space in the home can make practice feel like coercion and drudgery. If the tool fights the user, no amount of parental nagging will create a habit.
The sound does not inspire practice
This consideration might be the most subjective of all, but it is no less important. When most people are buying a keyboard as an instrument, they are usually thinking of some kind of piano. Pianos sound nice, but many people forget the sheer variety between the quality of the piano sound that is synthesized in cheap plastic instruments and the beautiful sound of a proper acoustic or digital piano. If the instrument does not sound nice and inspiring, no one will want to play it, and no amount of regular practice times or headphones will be able to change that.
The sound engine and samples are far more important than most think. Anyone comparing Yamaha pianos for sale will encounter lines of digital pianos such as the CLP or P series. What most do not realize is that this feature is what makes the instrument desirable in the first place: you want to sit down and play it more, which means you will play it more, and that is what you need to develop a habit of practicing the piano.
The keys feel inconsistent under your fingers
Please be seated and play one slow scale, one note at a time with a steady pressure. On a good piano, all the keys will feel the same in terms of their response to your touch. There is no key that fights your fingers harder or lighter than the rest and no key that gives you a stronger or weaker response for the same pressure applied. On a bad or old instrument, you will find one or several keys that are either sticky or light, and the one right next to them will often be the exact opposite. This is annoying in the extreme, and if you ever get a proper piano, you will unconsciously develop bad habits in your touch because the response of the keys in your new piano is consistent across the board.
Notes vanish when you hold the pedal
You will most likely have to listen closely to detect it, but when you hold the pedal down and play one chord, then another to sustain the first, you may hear the first chord fade away. This is a function of the polyphony of the instrument. Most entry-level keyboards only have 32-note or 64-note polyphony, which means that they cannot play more than 32 or 64 notes at once.
The reason why this is relevant is that most pieces of music, especially the more complex ones, require far more notes to be held at once than most inexpensive keyboards can handle. To put it another way, if you play a piece of music that requires more notes to be held than the polyphony of your instrument allows, the extra notes will simply not sound, and it will sound terribly wrong. This is extremely frustrating to intermediate players because, in addition to fighting to make the piano play what they want, they now have to fight their instrument to get the sounds out, and the frustration is compounded when they realize they were right in the first place and their instrument simply does not deliver as expected when they need it the most.
You can’t connect it to anything
If you have a USB or MIDI port on the back of the piano, consider yourself blessed. If not, you will find that most modern practice tools such as Flowkey or Playground Sessions are now inaccessible to you, as is notation playback or recording applications that would help you track your progress. You may even have trouble finding apps that can help you learn the piano by showing you which notes you are playing in real-time.
These tools are far more important than one realizes because, together, they transform the practice into an engaging self-driven process that children love, and your ability to use them is now severely limited. If you check the specifications of a modern digital piano, you will not see a lack of ports any more. Headphones are now standard on most keyboards, including mid-range digital pianos. A piano with no ports is a piano that has no place in modern practice, period.
No one in the house can practice without disturbing anyone
Most people have busy schedules and free time, and the free time rarely coincides with all family members being at home. Practice sessions are limited to whatever slot of time is available when nobody is at home, and this slot is often barely an hour long by the end of the school day. Piano practice is a habit, and habits are only created when the opportunity arises regularly. It is difficult to build a regular practice habit if your only available time is a narrow hour-long window at night.
In most cases, a habit like this is created when all members of the family have their own practice time at different times of the day so that a teenager can practice in the morning, a parent can practice while the children are at school, and a small child can practice their scales while the parent is on a conference call. This is not a matter of convenience but of habit formation, and it starts with the ability to have headphones. Most modern digital pianos in the price range of several thousand rubles already have standard and Bluetooth headphones.
Why this all matters more than you think
According to a Harris Interactive survey conducted for the American Music Conference, 92% of Americans believe that music making is an essential part of a well-rounded education. The general consensus is that music is important, but the reality is that most people are in a disadvantaged position when it comes to making it a part of their lives because of the environment they are in. An instrument that fights the player, steals notes at the worst time, cannot connect to anything, only lets you practice at inconvenient times, and sounds cheap is a terrible catalyst for developing a habit of practice, regardless of the best intentions of parents. Tuning and regulating an acoustic piano can also be tremendously expensive. A modern digital piano covers all of these points at once, which is why it is so good at fulfilling the role of an instrument in practice. None of these points are meant to encourage you to get the latest and greatest digital keyboard on the market. These are considerations that most people do not make when getting a piano, but should because they have a substantial effect on the ability to practice the piano on a regular basis and develop the habit. Once the habit is formed, the instrument you use to practice can be discussed.
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