Buying Your First Piano Or Keyboard in London and the UK
Do you have a piano or keyboard at home? It’s essential to have access to an instrument to practise on during the week between lessons, in order to make your piano lessons worthwhile.
Taking beginners’ piano lessons is only one (albeit important) part of learning to play the piano.
Ultimately, the success of your piano lessons depends, in large part, on the time you put in practising piano between your lessons. Each week your piano teacher will assign you material to practise and work on before your next lesson. If you are unable to practise, your piano teacher won’t be able to move forward with you to the next task, and your piano lessons will be of little value.
This doesn’t mean you must practise piano for hours on end to make your piano lessons worthwhile. Each of our piano students comes from a different background and situation in life, and our piano teachers design your piano lessons around the time you have available for practise. The key is, you must have some time on a regular basis - 5 minutes of piano practise per day is worlds away from having no practise time at all, and even small, regular amounts of piano practise will allow you to make steady progress.
So, what kind of piano should I buy?
When it comes to choosing the right piano, there are a lot of options. Prices range from the hundreds to the tens of thousands, and instruments from small, toy keyboards to grand pianos.
The first question is: Do I buy a real, acoustic piano, or an electronic keyboard?
Our answer is always the same: a real, acoustic piano is the ideal to learn on. The main reason is that as pianists, we are doomed to constantly be playing different pianos, everywhere we go, since the piano is not the most portable of instruments. If you play regularly on a real piano, it will be quite easy for you to play any other instrument - real piano or electronic - but if all your practising is done on an electronic piano, transitioning to play a real piano will always be a struggle for you.
That said, there are many excellent digital pianos and keyboards on the market that are designed with a touch and sound that is as close to a real piano as possible. If you are planning to purchase an electronic keyboard (also called digital pianos, clavinovas, stage pianos, keyboards, synthesizers) we strongly recommend an instrument with the full 88-key keyboard, and weighted keys that imitate the key-weight of a real piano.