Rank musical instruments hardest to easiest

[Korg]

This is inspired by a conversation on another thread but off-topic so I’m starting a separate one.

I’m interested in mn views on what the easiest and hardest instruments are to learn. Dc1 plays several instruments, dc2 does piano and dc3 is about to start.

I never did more than 30 mins a day and got to grade 8 !!! I thought that was a lot. I can see now why my parents didn't !

That was clarinet but I'm pretty sure my violin playing best friends didn't do much more either !

Oh I think you can get to grade 8 on an hour a day for brass . Ds is fitting in more ( currently) because he's preparing for lots of things .
I learnt classical guitar and never did more than 30-40 minutes - but then I was never going to be that good !!

Piano is easy to begin with, because it's really hard to make a horrible noise on the piano. Same is true of guitar and to some extent flute and clarinet. But piano gets so hard. DS is now on Grade 7 and all this triple counterpoint stuff looks really complex. Same with guitar. DS2 is now at an incredibly complex level of simultaneous plucking and strumming. I can't work out how some of his teachers produce the sounds they do. It sound slike three or four people playing simultaneously. At least with wind instruments you're only playing one note at a time.

Only someone aiming at the very top of the musical profession would need or want to practise six hours daily. I never did anything like that amount and have enjoyed a long happy career in a London orchestra.

Yes, I was a bit surprised by that too. An hour a day and often less and I got 4 grade 8s. My 3 sons with music scholarships have never done more than that unless there was something big coming up. Their father is a musician and pretty good and he might sometimes with an event coming up do more than that.

In terms of choosing what a 7 year old might start also have a think about what they might do at school - the school might have an orchestra and need cellos or violins. Cello is harder to move around but that not hard. It was certainly going to and from school with my daughter a few times a week for years.

I have been practicing/playing for more than 2 hours every day for the past two years or so, sometimes exceeding 3 hours when I am home & have the time to spread it out in the day. (My lower arms start hurting after 2 hours). And that's for fun. I'm an amateur musician.

The upside is that I'm progressing rapidly and can now play the music that I love. I can totally see a professional with no other commitments practicing for 6 hours in a day (because she wants to, not because she has to).

It's better to try to practise efficiently and prioritise quality over quantity. Knowing scales and arpeggios really well are the most effective shortcut to mastering classical music. A good knowledge of theory helps, as does also some ability on the piano, if that is not your first study. If anything is hurting, be careful. It could simply be fatigue which will improve as stamina develops, or the sign of tension in some part of the upper body.

A mum friend is / was a professional trumpeter. I'm sure that she used to practise for about 7 hours a day. One of the rooms in her flat was soundproofed so she didn't drive the neighbours crackers.

for brass instruments a lot of the practice is 'just' for stamina.
it's very very physical.
my sis is a proffessional french horn player and does 2 hours of warm ups and lip flexibilities a day on top of rehearsals and performance.
on off days it's half an hour long low notes.

Thanks for the insight, Granny. Yes, I could practice less and more efficiently, but I want to play the music I love (quite often all my rapidly expanding repertoire).

I suspect that the reason why my forearms hurt after an hour or two is that my music is Baroque, which is not written for the deep & heavy keys of the piano but for the light & shallow ones of the harpsichord. All those trills and different ornaments of especially French Baroqueare quite difficult to play properly on the piano. (I play the harpsichord too, but have just a piano at home).

By the way, we have a thread for amateur musicians to share our trials & tribulations Come join us on the Instrument Players Chat thread

ColdFeetAndHotCakes has nailed it pretty well with the differences, but in the end it does all come down to personal abilities. I couldn't get on at all with the trumpet which I started on for a year (we had one going spare), but switched to trombone a month before my grade 3, and sailed through it! Many colleagues have similar stories - once they found the instrument that suited them, they progressed rapidly.

It could be mental - i.e. you find it easy to read several lines at one, or simply physical - your mouth happens to find it easy to form a certain type of embouchure, but not another type.

All instruments are difficult to master, but some are easier to get started on.

Agreed, Maestro. DD happens to have a mouth shape and embouchure that make the physical production of sound on the French horn fairly easy across several octaves, whereas she struggled with other brass.

The mental leap to transpose the music is a different matter.

Keith - as a violinist myself, I know how much practice is needed. My DD has however proved to me that oboe grade 8 can be done within 5 years on 30-60 minutes per day.

I think it's possible to get grade 8 strings doing similar. I was probably a couple of years slower, but I only ever practised for about an hour when I was coming up to my grade 7/8 exams. Generally I would have been practising for 30-45 minutes.

More stamina is required on the violin though. I wish I had more time to practice & I'm at pro level. All day orchestra rehearsals can run 7 hours with just 2 breaks & it's always the strings who are complaining about the aches & pains, wind just seem to be able to get on with it! Violin parts are definitely much harder too which is why orchestras have so many of them so we all cover each other's mistakes 🤣 . DD already working at diploma level (after just 6 years on oboe) & wants to become a pro & there is no way she will need to do anywhere near the amount of practice I had to do for conservatoire auditions!
Wind instruments are very much more popular in secondary schools because it's much quicker to get them post grade 5 than violin

My ds got to grade 5 distinction on horn on about an hour a week of practice over 3–and-a-half years. He does an awful lot of other instruments though. It took three years to get to grade 2 distinction on violin, with about 2 hours a week. On the other hand, he practices one of the “easier” instruments on this list for about an hour or more a day for his grade 8 exam, which will have taken 5 years.

It's obvious from the posts here that there are many different definitions of easy and hard instruments to play. Some instruments are easy to begin and hard to master, others are the other way around. Some are hard if you're physically small or weak, others are hard if you don't have delicate little fingers. Some sound hard to someone listening or look hard to a person watching you, so get a reputation for being difficult because they make people think "Gosh, could never play that".. Some are harder to play in an orchestral setting because of the proportion of time that you are playing for, or the exposed nature of your part, or transposition. I will argue passionately that my own instrument is one of the hardest based on some of these criteria, but admit that in other areas it may be one of the easier ones. So there's no one answer to the question IMHO.

It also seems to me, from this discussion and from my experience, that some instruments are harder than others to an individual musician. Some people just have a knack for a certain instrument, their skills and physique suit it, they make it look easy and can improve with noticeably less practice than the average person. So I take with a pinch of salt any arguments based on "Oh my son is learning the kazoo and it's taken him seventeen years practising 12 hours a day to get a decent tune out of it".

Agree with everything Keith says there!

Agree about the difference between "getting started" and "getting good" and "getting towards the top". Just as piano is easy to start getting a tune out of, and then more complex (and seems to have a huge amount more technical progress to make beyond grade 8), I would say the same applies to church organ. If you are able to access an organ, it is straightforward to get started on - though of course you are better off learning basic musicianship skills on an instrument you can keep at home!! My son got a chance to try playing on an organ when he was not yet 6, and made a jolly good fist of it (especially considering we hadn't quite started him on proper piano lessons at that point). But he has turned out to be one of those "keyboard naturals" and is coming up to his grade 8 piano age 12. Organ is catching up fast having had actual lessons for only a couple of years.

It probably depends a lot on personality as to which instrument you will find natural and 'easy' too. My siblings and I all got quite good at very different instruments and I think personality played a big part in it. I loved the violin as a sentimental and imaginative child - it conjured up magical worlds for me. My brother who was physical and confident and not given to flights of fancy loved the trumpet. Another brother who was very good at maths and liked patterns enjoyed the piano. My sister who was driven by stories and communication liked singing. There may or may not have been physical easiness with the various instruments too but I definitely think personality played a part!

I think it's partly personal, but also the repertoire for each instrument needs to be taken into account.
Piano - huge repertoire, and a vast amount only accessible once you are a very competent player. Ditto violin and cello. Double bass - less in the way of repertoire - concerto movements often on the Grade 8 syllabus which would not be the case for piano.
Don't know much about brass repertoire, but I think making a nice sound is very challenging!

I think individual characteristics do play a role, but like others have said it does seem as if you get more progress for less practice time on woodwind/brass.

DD got to grade 5-ish on sax in two terms with no more than 15-30 mins of practice 3-4 times a week (with prior musical training - she was already post grade 5 in three other instruments). No way she'd have done that on violin even with her musical background.

The big obstacle to progression at this point was primarily stamina, which obviously would have required more practice time.

Agree with all the comments on what makes certain people suitable to certain instruments. But nothing can beat the love of the instrument that would contribute hugely how one finds easier to learn/progress. Some people just connect to a certain instrument nevertheless their body shape, personality, environment or luck... Perlman has rather chubby fingers for a violinist so apparently he was asked why he didn't take up cello instead. He struggled with hand size related technical challenges but that didn't stop him to be one of the finest violinist in the world. So, best to do what you love and you'll find easier to work hard (hence feel easier to 'learn').