I’ve played acoustic and electric guitar relatively well for quite a few years, have gotten into playing bass guitar in the last couple of years and have come to realize that it is my instrument. The possibilities are endless.
Same here. You can produce beautiful music with it, lots of pieces are written for that instrument, and you can carry it everywhere with you. Plus being able to play the flute well would mean that you have good lungs!
Saxophone. My very favorite instrument.
For me it would definitely be the piano. I took lessons as a child and regret quitting to this day.
Piano. I played it a few times as a kid - not in lessons, just in sneaking around in the big weird Freemasony hall I spent most of my childhood in, and picking things out. I love the sound, the way it looks when it’s being played and the feel of the keys under my fingers.
I’d never be any good due to teeny tiny hands with very little reach, but if I ever had a home big enough for a piano, I’d get one.
I falter back and forth hardcore between violin and cello. They’re both so versatile in that you can sound just beautiful with it, or you can sound just friggin awesome
I’m gonna go with violin for the portability of it over it’s giant of a cousin cello.
Acoustic guitar, so that I could competently accompany myself with a highly portable instrument.
I’ve been playing the piano since I was 7, and I would love to be a great pianist, but they just aren’t portable. Even portable keyboards aren’t as portable as guitars.
Oh, I forgot to ask:
Would you mind sharing what the price was? Maybe just a ballpark? I’m considering getting something from the Yamaha ARIUS line, and am looking at a $2,000 model…I’m just wondering how much more it would take to upgrade to a Clavinova. 
Check your PM’s…
We bought it at Alamo Music here in SA, btw.
It was delivered yesterday and it sounds great. However, a bizarre thing occurred when I was looking at the Yamaha website: They offer music books for sale, but many (if not most) state that they cannot be printed out due to copyright issues. Unless I’m missing something here, how does one practice piano from a music book being displayed from a PC/laptop? Color me 
Electric bass, because that’s what I play.
I can see however that guitar or piano are more “useful” choices.
Fiddle or mandolin.
How do you define musical instruments so that a voice is not one of them? Because it’s really, really a sore subject amongst vocalists, who do very much believe it to be a musical instrument, and their argument pretty much is as presented. I’d have assumed you just counted it out because you knew that there are a lot of singers out there.
I honestly have no real desire to master any instrument, as I’d rather play multiple ones at about the same level as I currently play piano, but I guess the best to master would be the electronic keyboard, as mastery means learning how to sound like any other instrument. If that’s not allowed, I’d go with just plain piano, simply because I view it as the hardest to truly master, due to being the most polyphonic instrument that ordinarily takes advantage of that characteristic.
Really, really close would be guitar, and I would pick the electric variety since true mastery would mean being nearly an acoustic master, too, or else you couldn’t play unaccompanied and rhythm guitar without distortion. My reason for wanting to learn does include the coolness factor, though.
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I would also love to be a master at boogie piano. If I could play like Meade Lux Lewis (youtube), life would be full of yay. When I am stretching out on guitar, I try to incorporate the rhythms and chords I hear when I listen to boogie piano (or T-Bone Walker on guitar)
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Don’t forget Lloyd Glenn on piano on those T-Bone records – that was always some bad stuff. You can get boogie down, but it’s a lot harder than it sounds to improvise coherently, and, frankly, they never get a good reaction because it seems everyone knows somebody when they were really young (like tween or pre-teen) who could play some little set piece.
To above: good weighted-action keyboards aren’t that much $ these days. Look into the Casio Privia line – highly regarded among professionals.
Balalaika. I want to play Lara’s theme from Doctor Zhivago.
What I care about is getting deep inside the groove. Pounding through endless chord-progression cycles, keeping the boogie groove chooglin’ along while throwing different fills and breaks over it. Boogie can’t help but make me smile, and getting that deep inside the groove…well, I know it would re-set my head, my sense of well-being and how to look at life…and boogie real hard.
Mastery, to me, is more about getting inside the instrument and the music - the zen experience of that. Whether I would end up performing is a different question. But I can get inside the music when I play guitar today - but I suspect it would be a whole new level of “zen connection” if I could achieve that inside feeling with boogie piano or jazz guitar like Grant Green or Kenny Burrell.
Fiddle. I’ve yet to hear an instrument that is better at getting people up on their feet.
The visisonar.
i’ve been playing the sitar for around 4 years now. only took lessons for two years… would love to have the time to devote to mastering it.