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@Emotive
Welcome to the forums! My goodness, I found your post about why you feel a spiritual connection with the piano both eloquent, heartfelt, and how many of us feel.

.. 'Purity and goodness' expresses it.

You will find the forums helpful.. use the piano technicians forum for questions about the care and feeding of your Baldwin. The adult beginners forum has several thread of beginners that are studying with the various adult method books.

I liked this reply on the Technician's Forum to the Secret Life of Pianos thread:

Thanks so much, Bob, for posting. His love of the acoustic piano is so heartwarming.... 'treat your piano like a great aunt you love'. Regardless of the positive attributes of digital pianos, I wonder how many digital pianists would have that type of emotional connection? I think many of us with acoustics do.

Well, when I was a kid I always loved playing around on the keyboard my dad had. My grandpa also had an organ in his house that we used to love just playing around on. I never took lessons or anything like that but as I grew up I loved listening to music with piano in it. My alarm used to be Hungarian Rhapsody #5. I just don't know why I have always been drawn to it. I don't know anyone who plays the piano but when I did come across someone who could I was just fascinated by it.

Then, as some mommies tend to do, I put my kid in piano lessons. I bought her a digital piano and she had about 10 lessons and gave it up. But we kept the piano and I would use her books and kind of just play around with it. Stopped. Then picked it up again and kept at it. Times fell hard and I had to sell the piano but I vowed that when I had enough money to get one again I would. Then in March I took the plunge and bought a Privia PX-160 with levels 1,2, and 3 of Alfred's Basic All in one books. Not realizing that they take a while to get through.

So since then I have practiced everyday for 20-30 minutes. Not including warm up. I love it. The satisfaction I get when I complete a new song brings me joy that I just don't get from very many places.

Honestly?

Partly because I love all music and wish to create my own.

Partly because in my 40's and it's good for my mental health and self-esteem.

Partly because I'm envious of people who can play music.

I did violin for a while, and I loved it, but I like piano because intonation isn't a concern and it provides its own harmony and rhythm.

Because nothing beats sitting down at the piano and making music come out of it.

I'm 65 and the first time I had a keyboard (it was a synth) around me I was 23 years old. I never took lessons and I always like to have a piano close to me since then. Now I do have an electric piano Yamaha P85 and that's enough to satisfy my needs. Why do I like to play it? I'm a guitar player mainly and I started in '69. Then I learn how to play bass few years after. I was a self taught musician till '80. I took some jazz lessons on the guitar. After that I followed a full year a complete arranging course. I needed the piano more than ever before. I was checking the harmony, if it was possible to use different types of harmony or chords. Through all these years I learned other instruments...like violoncello, Chapman Stick...this last one bring me back to the piano. I often switch between these 2 instruments...they are quite similar in many ways...hands independance for example. The stick is a tapping instrument and I like to play chords with my left hand and improvising with my right. I do the same on piano. More I pratice one more I feel good on the other one...they complete themselves. But...they are so different on other sides. The piano is a very visual instrument...you "see" what you play (I don't read music on these instruments...I read on guitar and bass) while on the Stick it's almost all inside your head...sometimes you look at your neck but you have to come back in your mind to get a good improvisation. I love this side of the piano where you have a clear "image" of what you're playing.

I was a first generation of children in my family that was not sent to music school. In my home there was a XIXth century grand piano, completely out of tune, that I eventually spent some time with it, but obviously it was most unsuitable to play.

As a little child I was exposed to classical music and some 80ties pop music, as a teenager I was listening to some pop-rock orientated radio, and eventually I got tired and bored of guitars everywhere. I reminded myself some odd sounds and started looking, that how I re-discovered the 80ties pop and electronic music. The same time I had trouble sleeping, I couldn't fall asleep because of songs playing in my head again and again, I could't get rid of.

Eventually, I discovered I can recoginize more pitch changes than in the past, I also started hearing at first, very odd sounds, and later, strange melodies I couldn't recognize. At some point I've discovered that I can controll this melodies that appear in my mind, change them, develop them, and invent new ones.
Finally, when I was 22 I think, I bough myself a keyboard, because I wanted to bring those melodies from my head to the outside world, back then I didn't realize how difficult this would be.

Struggling to play anything, and after some pathetic attempts to make any composition, I decided to take piano lessons. Those were both helpful and distatrous in some areas, but eventually they helped. By the time I got more and more into classical music, and by now it

Why do I play piano now? Well, I'm not really sure. It's enjoyable, it brings satisfaction, and when I do not play for some time, I get a strange feeling that something is missing. Also, when I play, I feel that my brain works in different way, like I can run away from this boring and mad world of human affairs, and do something interesting, isolated from it.
To me, classical music is not only a impressive workshop and beautiful piece of art, it is also a cure for my spirit, while playing piano is life for my mind.

I was originally trained as a singer (boy soprano). When I was old enough to play church league basketball, the games ran too late for my bedtime so my parents got me lessons as a consolation prize. I have never looked back. It was a good way to not fit in comfortably in High School, it was a great way to pick up girls in college, and it now prominently fits in my collection of quirks as an engineer.

I love the piano the way some guys love cars, or motorcycles, but it's a cheaper hobby than racing. If I ever get a man-cave, there will be two good pianos for fourhand parties and a matching pool table. The piano has been my salvation, my downfall on more than one occasion, and a place to turn to when it was time to retrieve my sanity. It's an incredibly frustrating instrument, yet so rewarding when I do finally make my peace through whatever piece I am struggling with--Brahms Op. 118 No. 2 was what finally taught me to breathe with the music at the piano, for example--that I forgive it.

On an existential plane, I guess I have to be forgiven by *it* as well. My relationship to the piano has not always been good--forced to stop playing for many years by repetitive motion problems arising from bad posture and poor technique or putting a bottle-opener on the leg of my grand--but I have always gone back to it, which makes it my home in life, no matter how far I wander. My life would be deeply impoverished without it.

Hi After lurking here for more than a year, I've decided to finally register

I'm adult restarter with regard to classical music, and a beginner on the piano. As a kid I had music lessons for four years ("music school"), followed by four years of classical organ.

Back then, my main reason to go for the organ was because I wanted to play the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor In the end I managed that , but never got around to playing the Fugue without mistakes

Later, my parents were not too happy with the classical organ repertoire ("church music"), and 'encouraged' me to switch to a keyboard; so I wasted (my current opinion) several years playing on arrangers. At around 2001 I started university, sold the arranger (Technics KN-3000) cancelled lessons, and basically quit playing.

In 2007-2008, I started again on an arranger and discovered that I hated it. I switched, in rapid succession, from a Yamaha arranger to a Roland Atelier AT-100, and finally a Hammond XH-200, which I kept until last year. In the end I settled on playing (mainly) movie/broadway soundtracks by using lead sheets, improvising a complete left hand and bass accompaniment myself.

Last year in June, because of a move to where the big XH-200 couldn't follow (stairs, tight bends, and such...) I sold the Hammond and bought a Nord C2D, thinking to move back to classical organ and do some 'pure' Hammond-like stuff along with it.

I failed miserably

For some reason, I now don't like to play classical organ, and there are very few pieces I like to listen to. I don't know why. With regard to the Hammond, I dislike it as a solo instrument, though I *love* hearing it in a mix. I greatly missed the orchestral capabilities and layering of the XH-200

At some point, while searching for organ techniques, I accidentally found this piece on Youtube:

Of Monsters and Men - Organs

It's a simple piece, but I love it. I also discovered that it's impossible to play well on the organ (ironically enough) because of the required sustain and subsequent decay of the bass notes

I did the thing I never thought I would do: I started to research piano's that had multiple layer capabilities. If there is ONE instrument I've disliked in my childhood, it was the piano. All the piano's I ever heard were either cheap, crappy digitals, or badly maintained uprights, so my experience with the piano wasn't very good

In the end, after researching the Nord Piano 2, Yamaha CP4, Roland RD-800, Kawai MP7 and MP11, I ended up with the Kawai MP7. Off all those stage piano's, I liked the MP7 best. In my opinion, it had the best user interface, the only one with an (almost) complete drawbar organ, and the piano sound I liked the most. (Even though I never played a piano, I knew what to listen for because of the extensive research, and how to test it.) It even had the lowest price of all of them

In december 2015 I decided to finally to get the MP7 and 'try some piano'.

Since then, I have been moving my soundtrack/broadway repertoire to the MP7, slowly, inventing a new left-hand-only accompaniment for use with the lead sheets. I've also started to play some popular music as piano-only songs (lead sheets also, with improvised accompaniment by listening to YouTube video's).

This went fine, and the Nord C2D organ fell into disuse.

I haven't found anything the yet that the MP7 can't do. Because I already used a TV-monitor with a mini-computer for sheet music (I need music at A3 format because of poor eyesight), I got Pianoteq while it was on sale a few weeks ago. With it, I got the free Kivir collection, the Ruckers Harpsichord, and the two Kremsegg collections, just because I like the old sounds. I the end, I connected the MP7+Pianoteq to a set of 8 inch Focal Alpha 80 speakers.

a few weeks ago, I thought to try some Bach again, at the piano/harpsichord this time, after not having played that sort of music for over 20 years. I've dug out some of the old music books. Burgmüller, Czerny, Hanon, a binder with "Etude 1 to 50" that sound remarkably like Bach, Scarlatti and Clementi (when playing the right hand only, as I can't sight read them anymore), and some other books in the Schirmer and Peters collections.

It didn't go well

When comparing what I did back then to what would be required now to obtain ABRSM grades, my level at the time would have been somewhere within ABRSM 5. Now, my classical repertoire is completely shot I can't even do a single Bach 2-part invention any more, and I make mistakes when trying to sight read the left hand of Minuet in G Major... reading lead sheets and chord symbols does that to you, I suppose.

Still, I want to play a solo instrument that does not depend on special things such as the MP7's layering capabilities, and that does not need speakers and other stuff connected to it. It also needs to fit into the living room, for which the MP7 has now become too wide.

After careful research and testing, I settled on a Roland LX-17; it will be delivered in another two weeks or so.

The MP7 will stick around in the computer room for the multi-part movie/broadway soundtracks and the use of the old piano's and harpsichords, while the LX-17 will be used to restart the classical music, moving from organ to piano, and for playing piano-only versions of the soundtracks.

Well... even though I'm not a beginner at keyboard instruments, this is how a classical/electronic organ player ends up as a beginner at the piano

My nickname represents how my classical repertoire currently sounds

Musically, I started out on the guitar. As a pre-teen I became completely enamored of the Beatles (which still holds very much today), so picking up guitar was a natural progression for me in the mid-60s. Like most who approach popular guitar, I learned chords and strumming and eventually fingerpicking, but played without learning to read music. Still, I got good enough later to play professionally in a band.

At age 17, about the time I first began gigging in a band, I knew a woman who played the piano quite well and she wanted to learn guitar. Meanwhile, I wanted to expand myself musically, so we decided to trade lessons. I think I took about six piano lessons before quitting. I was too impatient. I wanted to really play something of substance as opposed to simple beginners’ arrangements of things like nursery rhymes.

So I took my knowledge of chords and moved them over to piano, which proved to be much easier to see on a keyboard than guitar because of how everything is arranged in exactly repeating groups of 12 black and white keys. Then I taught myself to arrange for piano by listening to music that would challenge me and then duplicating what I heard. In this way I learned tricks about arranging for both hands.

Along the way I discovered a love for Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Rachmaninoff and others. I soon became proficient at playing from a lead sheet and also filled in some blanks by learning basic music theory. I never learned to really sight read, however, though I often wish I had. I can always figure out the sheet music if I really want to, but I can’t just sit down and immediately play it. I can only do that with my chord piano arrangements.

Recently I discovered the mostly forgotten but great Broadway composer Vincent Youmans. I soon fell in love with a lot of his music and worked up arrangements of several of his classic songs. But one thing I realized in carefully studying the sheet music for his songs was that there were subtleties that would be easy to miss going purely by chord notation. Back in the 1920s and 30s, they were heavy into “color chords” and the original arrangements often did unexpected but very nice things. So it’s been educational to go through and figure out the precise musical notation and incorporate some of those important details into my arrangements.

Why do I play piano? Because I can’t think of anything more gratifying and artistically satisfying than sitting down at my 7-foot Mason & Hamlin BB and letting my fingers loose. It makes me happy. It can be exciting, joyful or meditative, but it’s always healing on many levels, and it doesn’t get any better than that.

cause It is the best thing in my life (not only piano I play guitar too I can't choose one of them :D)

So as to pursue the inimitable catharsis derived from certain music... or just make pretty noise, depending on how you look at it

Well ,
I can remember my self listening to music from my early years.
Around age of 7, i was given by my grandfather an old AM radio and i was listening to stations until late night.
Never had some kind of music education thought, didn't had the mind the keep in track those days nor my familys economics could allow such expences.
But that music in my head was always there,anywhere,anyplace.

Life is funny some times and some decades later my daughter wanted to learn music (guitar) and i also decided to give music a try.I also thought that the precious dad (me) should try just to set a good example for the daughter.
Even in my wildest dreams, i couldn't imagine that in any point of my life i could play even any song with piano
Some three years later i keep going (and don't care how far it will get me to).

Didn't had in mind to learn especially piano , mostly keys (great fan of electro-pop and such) . Also not great fan of classical music but i follow teachers instruction (but i managed to convince her to switch to rock songs ).
In the meanwhile i switched from midi keyboard to synthesizer and after that to stage piano now (teacher thought it would be good for the blues lessons).

I come from a long line of accomplished musicians. Music is in my DNA. To not play would be like being pregnant and never giving birth.

This is a great question.

Some background about me.

Well I started at 12 years old taking piano lessons. It did come easy to a point. My mother and my two sisters played. I played through high school and college. During college I played with several bands with a Hammond Organ and Rhodes 88 electric Piano. After college got married and stop playing for 20 years raising a family and working keeping that kept me very busy. Started taking lessons when my daughters were taking lessons. I am taking lessons now from a wonderful pianist here in Houston. I have fallen in love again with the Piano. I will keep playing until I cannot play. This is probably going to be my retirement gig somehow. I have played for churches and for retreats for the last 6 years. Nothing like playing Chopin, Bach, Mozart or any of the other masters. I still am not as good as I should be but I am trying.

The piano has really defined me. I would not have it any other way.

I realised that my post earlier in this thread mainly describes HOW I ended up at the piano, but not WHY.

In the last 10 years, I've been looking for a solo instrument: an instrument that can be played without any extra's, such as drums or accompaniment. Because I studied classical organ for four years as a kid, and had played home organs extensively, I tried the Nord C2D, because it has both classical and Hammond capabilities.

I didn't like it too much, because it's just not fit for playing popular music. The classical organ is exceptional, but only fit for classical organ music. The Hammond is near perfect as well, but for playing popular music, it really, really needs some accompaniment. I found that I don't really care for solo Hammond.

The one thing I like about classical organ is the huge, never-ending reverb. The same holds true for something like a flute played in church. I found something similar in the sustain of the piano.

I've never considered piano before because the ones I've played in the past were really low-end digitals, or badly maintained uprights, and the people I knew that played only played classical music... often very fast pieces.

After getting into classical music more, outside of the organ, I found pieces such as the Moonlight Sonata (1st movement), the Gymnopedies, and some very slow modern pieces such as "Organs" (hehe) by Monsters and Men.

Pieces like that bring out the sustain of the piano. That is what made me try the piano (with the MP7) and finally switch from organ (to the LX-17, after selling the Nord C2D).

I now play the piano because it can be such a soft and lyrical instrument. To some extend it's also therapeutic / meditative or something. Maybe you can't believe it, but I can play something like Bach's Prelude in C, BWV 846 in a loop for an hour. (No, I'm not afraid to use the sustain pedal with a Bach piece if I think it fits it :))

If anybody knows a piece like that in a minor key, I'd like to know.

Welcome to the forum!
Bach prelude and fugue in C Minor
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcFHuUJE0mU


imslp has a list of Bach compositions and the keys
http://imslp.org/wiki/List_of_works_by_Johann_Sebastian_Bach

First, please let me say,

HELLO EVERYONE!

Oh, I so LOVED reading people's responses here. Thanks to all for sharing some of your personal reasons.

Me, the reason is quite simple: I love music, and the piano's sound is part of who I am--it's the sound of my soul. However, not that I really play any actual songs yet. The music is still only in my heart and soul... waiting for my hands to catch up. LOL.

(ALSO: LATE TO THE PIANO: I loved reading your response!)

Thanks!

Thanks I should have been clearer. I didn't mean the/a Prelude in c Minor; I know that one. I meant a Bach piece with a lot of broken chords, like in BWV 846, but in a Minor key, that can be played slow and with sustain pedal

My first post. I have been lurking for 3 or 4 years and finally registered.

Playing piano helps my attention deficit hyperactivity disorder; it really calms my thinking and makes my brain feel unbelievable relaxed, creative, and energized. I am a "better" person when I practice on a regular basis.

I began playing from 8 to 12 years old; taught mostly classical music. Moved onto designing circuits and programming during jr high and high school and consequently stopped practicing piano for nearly 35 years.

Married and kids came along. My wife suggested we have the boys practice and play piano, now 14 and 10. The boys began playing about 7 years ago, and I fell in love wanting to practice while watching the boys and the instructor playing and practicing.

Now the 3 of us take private lessons (as a family) each Sunday afternoon for the past 5 years.

We all perform at the bi annual piano recitals, including myself. I am 52.

I can say that practicing piano has tremendously helped my technical work creativity. The past 5 years I have written and filed over 45 U.S. patents. When I don't practice regularly, I can immediately tell when my brain is off. I am sharper and more creative now then when I was between 20 to 40's.

I am currently practicing 3 Stephen Heller pieces for our January class recital. I never heard him before but his music touches my soul like jazz - but this classical music.

I have been practicing basic jazz scales and some basic blues; I am a closet jazz want to be player; I envision the sustained improvision will also help with my ADHD.

-stu