Among other salient features, the Suzuki method for teaching violin featured sub-scale instruments sized to youngsters as young as 4 years. As the kid grew, he/she got a larger & larger violin & at some point grew into playing full-sized instruments. None of the small ones were toys; they all worked and sounded just like the real thing.
I was wondering if anyone knows of similar fully functional sub-scale pianos? Either traditional mechanical acoustic or new-fangled electronic.
Certainly there are toy pianos and Casio makes a variety of “instruments” for kids which have limited range, poor keyboards & pitiful fidelity.
I’m looking for something with full-up musical ability & full-up feel, but with a keyboard between 1/3rd and 2/3rds the size of a standard piano. Not just fewer octaves, but smaller, more closely spaced keys.
Not sure if they go small enough for a young child though.
I one saw a video of a woman in Japan (I think) playing a piano with a very strange keyboard where the keys looked like squares. I can’t seem to find anything about it anymore though.
Since a lot of piano playing is muscle memory (so you don’t have to look at your hands all the time), I would think a scaled down piano would impede this as the child grows. I learned at age 6 or so, played for about 20 years (mainly for personal enjoyment), and recently bought a (cheap) keyboard. Between the slightly smaller keys, and having to hit the key in just the right spot, I can barely play it. On the rare cases when I find a real piano, I can still play a few bars (at least) of some standards from memory.
Playing the normal piano wasn’t an issue for me. After about a year, I could hit an octave cleanly. My feet reached the pedals, but I had a little muscle coordination issue at first.
Handedness shouldn’t be an issue.I’m right handed, but for the first few years of piano, my left hand was actually more dextrous and faster. It still has a greater span than my right hand, but I’m so right-hand-centric now in my playing.
They’re transferable, but there are differences. Is she learning on a weighted or unweighted keyboard? What exactly is she learning on the keyboard? Is she playing keyboard sounds, synth-type things, or what? I grew up on piano, but I found out there’s a somewhat different set of skills involved with being a good pianist and being a good keyboardist or synth player.
I’d say it’s usually easier to go from piano to keyboard. For one thing, even weighted keyboards are usually easier to press than most pianos, so your muscles are weaker if you’ve only practiced on keyboard. Furthermore, with the right sound, you can pretty much play exactly what you would play on a piano on a keyboard. Finally, synth work usually involves playing less, as the sounds are much fuller and sound bad when too many are used. It’s easier to simplify your playing than to complicate it.
I say this as a keyboardist who gets noticeably worse when he plays on a real piano, even though I mostly use the piano sound on the keyboard.
I don’t have any opinions to offer in terms of actual information but I’m lefthanded and it had a deletorious effect on my desire to practice piano as a child. My left hand has always been stronger and defter than my right and playing some of the more complicated pieces were very frustrating for me when I couldn’t get my right hand to do the correct movements but on the rare occasions I had a piece that utilized the left hand a great deal, I would shine. If you think your kid is a southpaw, please make sure to intersperse some left hand oriented music in the lesson plan.