I tried to teach myself the oboe in high school. As I was already a musician, I didn’t think it would be very difficult. Oh my god. The oboe is just impossible. If you don’t know what you’re doing, it sounds like a duck. Not so pleasant.
Last quarter, I took gamelan, which is a sort of Indonesian musical style. Some of the instruments were very, very difficult indeed, especially for someone trained in western musical thought like myself.
Ahh… but it has a down side too. How do you play, for example, 3 identical notes one after the other on a trumpet?
Do! pause Do! pause Do! … yes?
Now try the same thing on bagpipes. 'Cos they’re constant all you get is Dooooooooooo. So to make the individual notes distinct you have to slip very quick other notes in there…
Do! re Do! re Do!
Knew I should have taken up the tuba… Oom pah pah, Oom pah pah, <repeat ad nauseam> 
Well, going by Arnold’s refined criterion, then,
–I would say that, given the same amount of time in which to learn, it’s probably the easiest to figure out how to plunk out “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on the piano, and the hardest to get something even remotely resembling it out of an oboe. There’s a reason why they don’t encourage kindergartners to take up the oboe the same way they push the Suzuki violin. What Kyla said. Doubled.
It is axiomatic among professional orchestra musicians that the oboist is always a little crazy. The serious scientific explanation (sort of) is that all that back pressure builds up in your face and brain, from the exertion, and eventually affects your personality. Me, I think you have to be a little bit crazy to take up the oboe in the first place. And then, so much depends on the reed, and whether it’s having a Bad Day. Most serious oboists fiddle with their reeds endlessly, and have 30 or 40 different reeds, for different atmospheric conditions, different compositions, etc. Even a violin is pretty consistent, and with a French horn, at least you know what you’re in for. But an oboe is virtually never the same twice running.
It’s harder to get “Mary Had a Little Lamb” out of a guitar in the same time frame, because it involves two hands. Plunking it out on the piano only involves one hand, plus you don’t have to balance it on your lap. A piano just stands there obligingly, waiting for a sixth-grader to come along and play “Heart and Soul” over and over and over again, until somebody bellows, “Shut UP!” from the next room.
Then he starts playing “Chopsticks”.
Pipe organ, definitely. Gawd, those things are hard. It’s like dancing and playing piano simultaneously.
And I don’t mean wussy little two-keyboard electric things they used to sell in malls, I mean four-console-ninety-rank-forty-foot-high-takes-twenty-minutes-to-warm-up animals. The kind with stops labeled “16’ Lieblich Gedeckt”. [Tim Allen grunt]
Huh. That looks like it says “takes twenty minutes to warm up animals.”
did anyone see a posting by me about grace notes in some other thread? I could have sworn that last night I posted something very similar to what Appolyon said: that to sound the same note twice in succession on the bagpipes is impossible, so you have to slip in the grace notes. (there are other reasons as well, but that is one of the main technical ones.)
Maybe I shouldn’t have trusted the cgi, or whatever it is.
But to reply to Astroglide:
I’m afraid I disagree. It may be easy for someone to pick up a practice chanter and play a simple tune, but I am very doubtful that anyone could just pick up a set of pipes, blow the bag, keep the three drones in tune with each other and the chanter, and pick out a simple tune.
As well, with respect to Notthemama’s comments about the difficulties with the oboe reed, and oboeists fiddling with different reeds all the time, the same goes for the pipes - only you’re fiddling with four different reeds, of two different designs.
Octaves are in every scale. Diatonic referes to a maj/min scale with 5 whole steps and 2 half steps, this includes the modes. The modes are derived from the major scale (you can think of them as different starting and ending places on the major scale). If you omit some intervals from a major scale or one of its modes you get a pentatonic (5 note) or hexatonic (6 note) scale.
Didn’t see it, but I think you covered every other horror of the pipes. How long have you been learning?
I don’t imagine I’ll get very far with learning them… it seems that you’re best to start about the same time you learn to walk…ahh, but the sound… always sends shivers up my spine.
'bout 18 months, Appolyon - and I’m still on the practice chanter, with 3 “chunes,” as the pipe major calls them. He warned when I started that it takes at least 18 months to 2 years before you even start to think of playing the pipes themselves, because of the difficulty of managing the drones and the bag, as well as learning the fingering. Which gets back to my original nomination…
but courage - remember the Talisker!
I play the oboe, and it is pretty hard. I have also played the clarinet, so I can compare. Yeah, lung control has a lot to do with it. Also, just trying to get a sound out of the double reed had me stumped for a awhile. Imagine blowing through a hole about the size of this <->. A lot harder than a clarinet. I won’t say that the oboe is the hardest, but is extremely hard. Anyone else play oboe that can back me up?
Two bumper sticker’s I’ve seen:
“Use an accordion, go to prison.”
… and later on, as a kind of rebuttal:
“I play the accordion, and I vote!”
When determining the difficulty of an instrument, I think one should also take into account the cost and difficulty in acquiring said instrument (since you can’t even begin to learn it until you’ve gotten your hands on it)… in which case, I would have to agree with Notthemama about the violin, because even a low-priced violin can be tens of thousands of dollars. A pipe organ is big and expensive, but you can go to just about any church in the U.S. to fiddle around with it.
However, I’m referring only to relatively well-known instruments… if you want to get into the more obscure instruments, I’d have to say the 7-Up can is the most difficult to play (it’s always been used as a container for a soft drink, but it’s only recently been touted as a musical instrument).
I’ve tried to learn the theremin. The concept is simple-- Wave your hand in front of an antena and get a sound. It’s actually quite difficult. Anyone can make a woo-woo noise, but playing something recognizeable takes a lot of control and near perfect pitch. The bagpipe is second (a friend tried), but the pipes still have a tone range limited by the holes in the chanter and once tuned, the changes are set. The theremin is a constant tone that is infinately tunable and operates in real time. That means that the only way you can find middle C is to have a good ear for pitch. Some thereminists wire an electronic tuner to the theremin so they can see how close to pitch they are. Once you find C, you can try to play a scale. You move your hand and have to find pitch again. This is usually made a bit easier by adding vibrato to cover up “looking” for the proper pitch. If your arm or body moves too much, the pitch will change as well. You can’t use a set of pre-measured distances from the antena to find the correct pitches because the distances vary with the weather, how long the electronics have been on, other people in the room, and anything else that can effect the ambient EM field around the instrument. Don’t forget that your other hand regulates the volume in the same manner. It’s not as sensitve as pitch, but to play expressively, volume control is vital. With all the trouble, why do people try to learn? When played corrctly, it’s the most expressive instrument you can find. Try listening to the soundtrack to “Day the Earth Stood Still”. That’s how most people become interested. The range of vibrato and volume control allow you to lend more soul to your playing than a violin if you can master it.
Thank you for everyone’s opinion! I’m learning a lot about music reading this thread.
So far, the candidates have been: oboe, french horn, pipe organ, bagpipes, aetherphone (theremin), shakuhachi (japanese bamboo flute), violin, french horn, some of the Indonesian instruments used in a gamelan.
As several other posters have noted, the question has not been phrased very precisely.
Let me suggest categories then:
[ul][li]Instrument that is most difficult to learn because it’s expensive and/or hard to acquire.[/li][li]Instrument that is most difficult to learn, if all you want to do is, starting from scratch, to play an easily recognizable tune.[/li][li]Instrument that is most difficult to learn, if you want to excel.[/ul][/li]From reading the thread, I would propose the following answers:
[ul][li]Instrument that is most difficult to learn because it’s expensive and/or hard to acquire: pipe organ. SPOOFE Bo Diddley says you can find one in any church, but I think you could probably only find a real one in a large cathedral, and I doubt they let any Joe Blow sit down and start playing it.[/li][li]Instrument that is most difficult to learn, if all you want to do is, starting from scratch, to play an easily recognizable tune: bagpipes, oboe, theremin.[/li][li]Instrument that is most difficult to learn, if you want to excel: theremin, shakuhachi.[/ul][/li]Notthemama, you seem to have a lot of experience with the oboe. Are you an oboe player yourself? (As you say, The serious scientific explanation (sort of) is that all that back pressure builds up in your face and brain, from the exertion, and eventually affects your personality. Me, I think you have to be a little bit crazy to take up the oboe in the first place.). 
Oh, I forgot another question that’s been stirring in my vast and encyclopedic brain. With all the advances made in synthesizers and ability to reproduce the tone of different instruments, will non-electronic instruments eventually go the way of the dodo? Especially if they are so difficult to learn? I personally wouldn’t be too surprised if thirty years from now I go to a concert and see thirty people each in front of a small Yamaha keyboard.
Arnold Winkelreid asked:
Some music is made with solely synthesized and sampled sounds. Rap and techno/house music often has no “real” instrumentation. This is still a valid approach to music. However, I do not think traditional instuments will disappear - people still play the lute. For some, the difficulty of learning and exotic aspect of the instument is a major attraction.
Also, I do not believe a synth will ever be able to accurately model the nuances of many traditional instuments, despite modeling making great advances (Roland’s COSM technology is sometimes amazing.) In my (limited) experience with today’s synths, piano and drum sounds are good, woodwinds are fair, strings are poor, and guitar is pure-T-cheese. Any attempt at vibrato on a synth should be punishable by death.
To use the guitar as an example, here are some very basic things that I just can not see being modeled/syntesized:
Trivia bonus: sakuhachi is also slang for “blow job.”
[Aside]
In the days of my youth, I played the french horn. One of my friends played the oboe, and he and I were the only practitioners of our respective intstruments through my entire primary educational career. The band instructor always used to have us practice together. It didn’t seem odd to me during middle school, but once I hit high school, I considered the fact. Why have a reed and a brass instrument practice together? Obviously, so that he could get the most painful part of his day out of the way in one go. I can vividly remember the dying duck sounds that my buddy was able to procduce, and I have no less trouble recalling the wavering notes I produced myself.
My buddy is now studying at Guilliard (if that’s the proper speeling). I, myself, abandoned “band” proper after a year in high school, and joined the “jazz band,” where I my years on the horn enabled me to pick up the trumpet in a day. I still played the horn for the orchestra, and got to play it for “Tommy” - the only rock usage of it that I’m aware of.
[/Aside]
To make that less mundane and pointless…
From experience, the horn is a hell of a lot harder than any other brass instrument, and than the piano as well. However, in my opinion, the oboe is more difficult than the horn, in all the criteria listed.
-ellis
One further point about the bagpipes (just in case you’ve not had enough) relates to the difficulty in learning to play, which I earlier mentioned in passing.
When you’re learning to play, because of the difficulty in handling the pipes, you begin with the practice chanter, not the bagpipes themselves. (The chanter has a single reed and looks like a skinny recorder.) Only once you’ve mastered the chanter, the fingering, and the different grace notes and ornamentations do you go on to the pipes themselves.
Depending on your abilities and your instructor’s methods, it can be months or more than a year before you ever get your hands on the pipes. (For example, I’m only able to practise as work permits, and my instructor is “old school” - learn the fingering drills before you even get a “chune” to play, so I’ve spent 18 months on the chanter.) Whether I’m typical or slow I don’t know.
Are there other instruments where you spend such a long time on a simpler practice instrument before graduating to the main instrument? Is there a practice oboe, or practice violin?
Apollyon, I don’t know if this has been addressed but the pah’s are actually the french horn part, not the tuba.
The Guinness Book of World’s Records lists the French Horn and the Oboe as the hardest instruments in the world to learn. As a musician I had to learn the rudiments of those instruments. The French Horn really sucked. The mouth piece was very small and the register was awfully high. The trumpet, tuba, euphonium, and trombone were all significantly easier.
Someone mentioned that the violin was difficult to play. Well, not really. I thought the steps were too small for a regularly sized hand but if you can listen to yourself while you play and play in tune the dexterity is fairly intuitive as it is with any stringed instrument. The difficulty with instruments like the violin, guitar, and lute is really with reading the music. On a guitar there are 9 places to play middle c which includes some basic harmonics. If you want to play C5 there are 12-15 places to play it including harmonics (I don’t feel like figuring it out now) since the harmonics used to get several of them are pretty nonstandard. This makes reading the music difficult but the dexterity involved in playing it is only moderately difficult. (It is more difficult than brass instruments, about the same as woodwinds but in a different way).
The shakuhachi is not really all that difficult. It plays in the nontraditional tuning used in Japan very easily, the music typically written for it is mostly improvised (you have a basic pattern of a song to play with grace notes, etc around it, very similar to Indian music) and the characteristic buzz happens automatically. When I took World Music, my teacher played the shakuhachi. She learned in Japan from some master of shakuhachi. She already had her doctorate’s degree in flute performance and I never heard her have a problem with creating a sound from it.
I would think the tabla (Indian drums that traditionally accompany the sitar) would be pretty difficult to play since tablah training is very rigorous and you have to get the drums to vary in pitch so much that they sound like they are talking. I have played some Indian music (I played the tamboura, which is just a drone instrument) with a few friends and was quite impressed with the virtuosity expected from the tabla players.
As for the bagpipes, it is quite easy to play songs on just the chanter. I have a chanter and learned to play it well enough to play songs on the nine notes that it has. I have a friend who went to college on a bagpipe scholarship and played his pipes. I got them to sound and could play a few notes but it took way too much air for me to do more than that without practicing them regularly. It used more air than the flute and tuba. The dexterity is not hard it is the stamina involved with the proclivity of air required to play the instrument. That comes with time and overall is not too difficult becuase you play in tune fairly easily and the music though it may be fast is not really difficult becuase you only have nine notes.
I also wrote music for the organ. I found the organ to be more difficult than the piano to compose and play; although, it is far from being the most difficult instrument. The stops are more difficult to understand than the footwork. It is pretty simple once you get the heal/toe thing down.
The real issue in dealing with the difficulty of the instrument is the amount of virtuosity expected from a decent player from it. This is where the piano (which is easy to play but difficult to play well) would be considered one of the most difficult instruments. A good pianist is expected to be able to play music that will make a good musician on any other instrument want to roll over and die. This is because a concert pianist is expected to have begun his/her learning process before the age of 5 and to practice at least 8 hours a day until they begin their professional carreer. The competition is that strong with the piano and thus one is expected to play that much better. It is easy enough to make sounds on it but to really make music and be competitive in the classical field, if you start after 5 or 6 you will pretty much be out of the running. No other instrument in western society has that much competition or expectations than the piano, thus the initial ease of making the music is supplemented with the degree of virtuosity expected.
HUGS!
Sqrl
My own experience is that brass instruments are generally easier than woodwinds. Why? With brass instruments, you only use your right hand (the exceptions being the French horn, and sometimes the trombone), and only have three or four valves to worry about.
Among the stringed instruments, I find the violin to be the most difficult to play well. Plucked or strummed intruments seem easier than mastering the use of a bow. (Although the Scruggs style on banjo is pretty demanding).
I’ve never tried the bagpipes, but based on what I’m reading here, it sounds as though it might be the toughest of all.
I’m surprised that no one has mentioned the didgeridoo – which requires the player to use circular breathing to take in air and blow it out at the same time. A friend of mine has been playing for a few years now and only recently has been able to get a decent tone out of it.
Otherwise my vote would be for bagpipes.