Piano Lessons
should I take piano lessons before learning guitar?
I want to be musically inclined and learn how to play guitar. However, I've been told that it's best to take piano lessons first, because if you can play the piano you can play anything. I would be taking the lessons at my college. What is everyone's input on that?
You should play the instrument you like the most or you will become bored and quit like 90% of the people who try to learn an instrument. It's not easy and you're going to have to enjoy your progress and have a real desire to go on. You should also get the best quality instrument you can possibly afford. If it doesn't sound good or is a pain to play... you'll quit. This is the truest and most important thing to consider IMHO.
Learning to sight-read music can help you with any instrument and give you a good background. But guitar requires a completely different strength, dexterity and technique to be built up over time. Finding notes and chords on a guitar is completely different than finding them on a piano. Learning to convert written music to keys on a piano by habit can actually get in the way if you try to change instruments.
Also... If you end up with a teacher who will only teach at the speed you can learn to sight-read... find somebody else. Some famous guitar players can't even do it. It takes a long time and there are other things you could be learning and playing at the same time. Chords, scales, etc... This will keep you more interested and you'll be able to start playing actual songs much more quickly. You'll start to develop different playing techniques and hand dexterity sooner...
I would take what you heard with a grain of salt. Many people who really master an instrument start playing that instrument at an early age.
Picking parts out of music with your ears has nothing to do with playing piano. That's in your head. You learn how to do it as try to learn an instrument and try to pick out the parts for your instrument in songs... figure out how they're playing them... The more you listen to music that way... the better you get at it. When you learn more about how to play your instrument... what you hear in music makes even more sense to you and you can copy songs by ear rather easily. Some people practice and develop this skill and some people don't. But, it has nothing to do with what particular instrument you learn how to play. Any manual dexterity you build on the piano would do you little good on the guitar. That's like saying if you learn to juggle you can type. It's two totally different things... Quickly finding notes and chords on a guitar and playing them cleanly is something you're only going to develop by practicing and practicing GUITAR. I've seen very good piano players struggle through 3 chord folk songs with several second pauses between chord changes on my guitar... lol.
piano lesson: beginner blues
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