I was flicking through the music channels before work and stopped on the Classical channel. Someone was playing the piano and I liked it, and said to myself “I wish I could do that”.
How hard/time consuming is it to learn? I have quick fingers (computer keyboard skills) and had an electric piano many years ago and learned a few single-finger tunes.
It’s not hard, I suppose… it’s like everything else: you get out of it what you put into it. It’s hard work–loads and loads of practice, from scales to chords to arpeggios–but you can master the technique.
As for the “music” part, the interpretation… well, you just have to have the ear, or the sense, or something like that–which I’m sure you do. 
How hard is it to learn? If you understand the concept, it’s dead easy to learn. What’s hard is making your fingers do what your brain hears without individual instructions for each finger.
How time consuming? How much time have you got? You’ll need all of it.
In other words, the distance between your untrained fingers and the ability to play what you heard on the television is at the very least, a decade of intense study in a classical program, with theory and performance and the study of composition and all kinds of stuff. It depends on how much you want to play the piano, really.
I understood the concept of it as a toddler. I only needed someone to show me the mechanics, and I was away.
So, not the weekend then. 
(only joking)
My desire to be able to play the piano (or to be more practical an music keyboard) is quite strong. Like most blokes want to play the guitar, for me it’s the piano. It felt good to play the few tunes I knew all those years ago.
Partly I’d like to have a talent to impress people, but mainly it would be the joy of playing a great tune.
Is there anything I can be doing in the meantime before I actually take the plunge and get a music keyboard?
When you look at a sheet of music (as an experienced player) can you ‘see’ the tune? (could you look at the sheet and instantly play it in your head?)
The piano is one of the easiest instruments to play.
It’s playing it **well **that’s the hard part.
But seriously, go for it. You might even discover that you’ve got a natural talent for it.
I’ve played piano since I was 12, IIRC, and love it. I only got to take lessons for about 6 months, so I’m largely self-taught. That means that my fingering sucks, and I can’t play the more difficult pieces that I’d like to be able to play.
I think an ear for music and a love for piano will take you a long way, however. I do play well enough that I can play at church. It takes a lot of practice, but if you love playing, you’ll love the practice, as well.
I say go for it! 
Nope, I’m the wrong guy to ask about that. I can’t read music to save my life. It hasn’t stopped me from playing several instruments for a living, though. If you show me how the song goes, or give me a demo or a record to learn, I’ll learn it.
My wife, on the other hand, has two degrees in music and is a piano teacher. She can barely play anything without sheet music, and when she does, she sounds like a piano teacher. She can play classical works so well that it scares me to death. We can’t have jam sessions at our house, though, because she has no idea how to improvise, and is loathe to make something up that might be lame. She tells me that they drain all of that spontaneity out of you at music school; once you learn The Method, you have to work very hard to unlearn it and play the music like you mean it.
Don’t let that stop you! If you find that after you learn how to play a few things, you can pick up tunes you know and have them come out right, by ear, you’ll definitely have a reason to continue. And there is something about playing a great tune, the right way, that is incomparable to anything else you’ll experience.
In regards to purchasing an instrument, it would help you immensely if you bought something with 88 weighted keys. A lot of learning to play the piano is the “touch.”
On the few real pianos I’ve pressed the keys of, there seemed to be a small amount of effort needed to push the keys down. More than computer and electronic music keyboard keys. Would this ‘weighted’ keyboard hamper the ‘ease’ at which I can tap keys quickly in succession?
Then again there have been other pianos where I’ve found it quite easy to push the keys down speedily.
The simple option to learn properly is to get a real piano. A decent electronic keyboard that in any way reasonably replicates the feel of a real piano will cost a lot more than a basic upright instrument. (Obviously, space can be an issue!)
You’ve identified the problem with a more basic electronic keyboard, that it simply does not enable you to develop a technique that will work properly when you step up to the real thing. Think of it as trying to learn golf by practising the swing, but never actually putting a ball on the ground and hitting it.
As the others have said, you’re looking at a long period of time and a lot of work. Doubly so because you’re going to be learning both how to play the thing, and how to read music. But it’s worth it
As for reading music - yep, eventually you develop the ability to ‘see the tune’, to hear the whole piece in your head (even from orchestral scores). But it takes time.
I wouldn’t think so. It’s hard for me to describe to you, but I’ll try. Like you mentioned, the keys on (some, not all) electronic keyboards are not weighted, so you don’t have the effect of playing lightly, softly, or hard. With the weighted keys, you are better able to learn the dynamics of touch in terms of overall volume of the instrument.
Some of the higher end electronic keyboards have weighted keys and give you a very similar effect to a real accoustic piano, but it’s not the same. For me, weighted keys help in overall performance because the keys “bounce back” better and they tend to strengthen your fingers.
I don’t think you can properly learn technique on a keyboard without weighted keys.
Depends on the piece. I’d like to think that the time spent taking lessons allowed me to understand a lot of music theory (still learning to this day) and what all the dots, lines and squiggles on the page meant. As a pianist I would say I’m somewhere between sight-reading and ear playing. My ear training has gotten better, and the more music theory I learn, the more I understand what I am listening to. When I am reading music, I am not necessarily looking at everything simultaneously, but rather for various ‘cues’ such as when I hold down the sustain pedal, or how loud/quiet I am supposed to be playing. Rhythm is still hard for me to interpret from just staring at a bunch of notes; some of the jazzier (I use that term loosely here) songs I’ve learned I had to listen to the teacher play it a couple of times to really understand the rhythm because unfortunately I can sometimes be a little dislexic when reading music 
As a student teacher, I really enjoy playing the piano and teaching others how to play (not to mention learning how to teach people to play )But I strongly agree with other people who say that you get what you put into it. If you want to be really good, you have to invest the time. Right now I play and teach the piano as more of a hobby and/or side job, nothing serious. So every time I hear another student who plays 100x better than I do, I always have to remind myself, “I could be that good if I took it that seriously”.
If I didn’t decide to be an English major I probably would have been a music major
Whether or not you can read sheet music depends on how you learn to play–as people have said, there are those who play from sheet music and those who play by ear. I am strictly the sheet music type. Yes, I can look at music and hear it. I had ten years of piano lessons, ages 7-17.
Assuming you can already read music, the next trick is to get a subconscious feel for the keyboard. You need to know what keys are where, and what you need to do to reach them.
Then, you need to get your hands limbered up. I really don’t know how difficult this is; I would certainly think that a person who does a lot of touch typing would have a good start, though as others here have observed, it takes more effort to press down the keys of a piano–and the older/cheaper the piano, the more effort it takes. A truly wonderful piano will act as if it wants you to sound good when you play. An average piano makes your hands tired. Piano teachers always used to tell me that as your hands get nimbler, the tendons on the backs of them “untwist.” I really wouldn’t know if this is true or not… my tendons are separate down to my wrists.
Once you have these three key components down, it’s just a matter of practice, and sometimes surprisingly little.
Pretty much all musical instruments are like that . . . It’ll take you five minutes to figure out how to get a sound out of it but years or decades to learn how to sound good on it. Believe me, as I’m a trombone player . . . It’s easy enough to make the thing honk and blat, but getting the slide in the right place? It’s a slide, so you can be wrong in an infinite number of ways!
I’ve been playing the piano for 26 years: I took lessons from the ages of 7-13, then studied again briefly in college.
My thoughts, as well. I’m not a music teacher, but I never recommend that people learn on a electronic keyboard, no matter how “realistic” it is.
Lobsang, if you can’t afford to buy an acoustic piano perhaps you could look into renting one (if you don’t live in an apartment or something). I have a very good digital piano that I purchased six years ago because an acoustic piano just didn’t work in an apartment, but now that I’m in a townhouse I’m considering renting an acoustic piano. I really miss the feel of a real piano, and I’m terribly out of practice. I used to play my mom’s piano when I’d go visit her, but she hasn’t had it tuned in a long, long time and it’s almost unplayable these days.
Agreed: I think that dynamics are an incredibly important part of learning how to play the piano, especially for anyone who wants to play classical music. Not having weighted keys will also hamper a person’s ability to learn how to read music (which is about more than just recognizing the notes), because they will not appreciate the concepts of forte, pianissimo, crescendo, etc.
I studied flute for a few years, and my mother could never get it to make a sound. Heh.
On the plus side, if you’re just learning to play piano, it still doesn’t sound BAD. It’s not like listening to a beginner learn to play the violin, for instance.
Thanks for all the replies so far You’ve given me stuff to think about.
In the short term I don’t have the room for a real piano, but I might consider shelling out for one of the electric keyboards with weighted keys, depending, of course, on how much they are and how much I want to at least be able to learn to play the piano tunes from classical music (and elsewhere) that I like.
In the long term I may end up with a house where I can fit a piano, so I may end up with a piano.
Any electric piano of the kind that’s generally being described takes up only a little less floorspace than an upright acoustic. It can’t take up any less width (a full keyboard is a full keyboard no matter what), and in depth terms there’s maybe a foot difference. Obviously the height is the big comparison - but you wouldn’t be squeezing an electric into a space where you don’t have headroom, anyway. And you can’t place all your photo frames on top of the electric
Real pianos are great but I’ve never owned one. I had one of these for a few years and I think it feels great. It’s portable, has weighted action and aftertouch, and its midi outs let me play any sound imaginable. I’ve seen them for about $600 new.
For the record, like Logsang, I thought paino and organ looked and sounded cool, asked for and got an inexpensive (<$100) starter keyboard and just learned some songs by ear. One of my first songs to learn: House of the Rising Sun. I play it incorrectly to this day. I still wish I had taken some lessons so I could read sheet music and to avoid the horrible habits I have now.
Not related to anything else but this is very cool:
It scans the keys and pedals of a standard piano to make it a midi input. Check some of the videos.
Unorthodox piano player here (I play by ear).
You can learn to play them the way you (may have) learned to play the guitar: by ear, getting your fingers accustomed first to finding the chords and making the chord changes, then adding the bridge notes, passing notes and melody, and tossing in some bass accompaniment. It might suit you better for picking songs out by ear or jamming with other people.
Classical piano training is geared towards the meticulously exact reproduction of sheet music, eventually culminating in playing the great classical concertos and preludes and whatnot. This is not by any means an unfortunate goal, but the training itself often has the unfortunate effect of reducing piano playing to a mechanical activity.