If your child plays the piano...

[Sandrine1982]

Hello.

I'm after some advice. Our DD (4 years old) is expressing interest in playing the piano. She is very musical so we've started looking into private piano lessons and buying a piano or a keyboard.

This is where it gets complicated. We have no idea where to start or what to buy. We don't really have the space for a full blown piano (yet) although we might get it later, so we're thinking about buying a keyboard. However of course we want to be as similar as possible to the piano in terms of quality, size of the keys etc.

Could anyone offer some advice on what we should buy for a 4-year old beginner?

Many thanks in advance.
x

The seller was offering to deliver anywhere outside Essex for £65, which seemed pretty reasonable to me. But let's keep it in proportion, this is a £200 upright piano from eBay, not a concert grand. I'd trust this to any regular furniture removal company. And it will probably want tuning on arrival but not for several years after that. We have a 5ft Yamaha grand piano at home and I couldn't remember the last time it needed tuning. DS10 would certainly tell us if it did! Whilst the alternative electronic keyboard won't need tuning, it will lose half its value the minute it's unboxed.

The problem isn’t trusting the furniture removal company. The problem is that furniture removal companies sometimes refuse to move pianos, especially if any stairs are involved, meaning you’d need a specialist company. Or if you are planning on moving your stuff yourself without paying a company, you can’t necessarily just get a couple of mates to move a piano the way you can a washing machine. Pianos can be seriously heavy cause the frame is just a massive hunk of iron.

So in my case, living in city apartments and moving around every couple of years, a digital piano cost me maybe 800pounds new and will have lost a lot of that value since, but a real piano would have cost me more in moving costs and tuning, even if I had bought it for next to nothing.
Like I said, it depends on your circumstances. If you live in a house you know you’ll be in for many years, and you’re going to be putting the piano on the ground floor with no stairs or just the front door step, and the piano dealer will deliver it, then a real piano may well be the way to go.

Your piano needs tuning. It should be tuned once every 6 months (at most a year). Temperature changes make the frame expand and contract and strings stretch over time.