Share your piano journey

My parents did not have a piano but grandparents did and they lived next door. The wonderful sounds that could be made by piano came across during early childhood, probably from attending Sunday school and by the time I reached eleven years I had persuaded my parents to send me to the local teacher, a lovely lady. Unfortunately for a number of reasons I gave it up after three years and did not touch a piano until ten years later.

I graduated from university in science and embarked on a Ph.D at a laboratory near Oxford that had once been a WW2 RAF station. I lived on site at the laboratory in a hostel that had once been the officers' mess. It had an upright piano in the large porch and there was one piece of sheet music which I used to reaquaint myself with notation. Two or three months later and I was playing carols, perhaps one finger each hand, at the hostel's Christmas party. I left the laboratory at the end of my three year research programme.

It was to be another ten year gap before I could acquire my own piano and in order to limit how much money to spend I bought a very early electric piano in 1983, a Bentley EP6. I had been married for a while and we had started a family. For the next five years I tried to learn on my own but at that time there were no YouTube lessons. We had moved house in 1988 to our forever home and knowing there was a piano teacher not far away I started lessons. This second teacher was very elderly and almost immediately tried to teach music which was far too difficult and it would take months to learn. She did persuade me that I could learn to sight read which has aways been my priority.
It was whilst I was with this second teacher that I donated my elecric piano to a school and replaced it with a UK made Kemble. At that time Kemble were in partnership with Yamaha.

The next phase of this story must have begun in the late 1990s when piano teacher No.2 retired and I started to attend an adult class in the local college. The problem was that due to my work schedule I couldn't get to the class until about thirty minutes before it closed but I liked the teacher very much. This continued for a few years until they decided to have a Christmas concert and I was so nervous I had a number of crashes in my piece.

It took at least six months to get over the crash and then I found my fourth teacher and vowed never to play in public again. I was with her for nineteen years until her retirement in summer 2023. We had great fun. She taught me to like Bartok and I introduced her to some Brahms which she had avoided because of small hands. We played some Mozart violin sonatas together but the biggest smile on my face probably came when I acquired two copies of Holst The Planets arranged as a piano duet by Nora Day and Vally Lasker under Holst's guidance. We played Jupiter at one of her little concerts for her adult students.

As for my vow never to play in public, I must have changed my mind, slightly! With the help of a friend we run a piano group so we do TRY to play. I am still very nervous. I know I am not a musician. At heart a scientist who likes music and piano.

Loved pianos and piano music as a kid but my parents organised organ lessons for me instead (previous generations were organists). Ditched lessons after a couple of years or so, well technically I ditched practice so my parents ditched my lessons.

Fast forward a couple or more decades and once finally settled down after a rather itinerant early adulthood I found myself in possession of a Yamaha keyboard (still not a piano) then an old Roland digital piano (getting closer) that I footled around on, trying to recall what I learned as a kid.

More years passed.

I upgraded the elderly Roland (some of either the electronics or key switches started failing in hot weather...) to a new Roland digital piano. COVID hit and I could access a real piano teacher online! Lessons commenced as did the purchase of my first actual piano (sorry DP fans). Yes, finally my very own acoustic piano. I haven't looked back.

Oh, and coming the full circle, my current teacher is actually an organist.

Pallas thank you for sharing your story and I'm so happy to hear that you're pursuing your love of piano. Thankfully there are so many online resources in this day and age and the option to learn without a teacher.

My piano story is also wrapped up in some trauma (nowhere near as bad as yours) and self-esteem issues and I've been trying to decide whether or not I'm comfortable sharing it. Maybe I will, we'll see.

My grandmother played the piano, directed the church choir, and played as church pianist. My mother played and gave a few lessons before she got married. We had an upright in the house for many years, but my mother didn't play and we didn't have music in the house.

There were four children in the house under the age of eight. My mom tried to give us some lessons, but she was just so busy taking care of the household that the lessons didn't last long. I think I topped out at a simple version of Old MacDonald Had a Farm. Fast forward 50-some years and I'm about to retire from a career in research. I decided I wanted to learn to play the piano. I bought a Yamaha CLP-something and started teaching myself using the Alfred's Adult AIO books. My spouse (who had had piano lessons for seven years as a child) said, "Why don't you take lessons?" The very thought made my blood run cold. Still. After a time I decided, okay, maybe I'll look for a teacher. I took a trial lesson with a teacher. I told her I wanted to learn classical music. She proceeded to show me jazzy improv on a baby grand (a white baby grand) that was in sore need of tuning and regulation. At that point I started lurking on PW and someone mentioned community colleges as a place to look for or at least ask for recommendations about teacher. So I went to the local college and the head of the music department immediately set me up with one of their teachers. I took 30 min lessons with her for two years, then switched to the department head and 60 min lessons.

That teacher has been my teacher for the last 10 years and I must say, it has been life changing, bless her heart. My teacher suggested upgrading from a digital to an acoustic; one night while I was practicing, my spouse said, "Have you ever considered buying a grand piano?" I said, well, yes, in fact I had. So we shopped for several months and bought a new Yamaha C3X, which we love.

My teacher suggested I might like to take theory classes, so I took two years of theory classes and then music history class for a year. After several years my spouse started playing again and I suggested theory classes might be interesting. After my spouse completed those, we both took (me for the second time) music history classes. And now my spouse is taking piano lessons from my teacher. So--music and piano in particular has become a major thing in our lives.

If it's possible to have a heritable predisposition to the piano, I should have it given my grandmother and mother. But in reality, most of what I can do on the piano is due to hard work and discipline. Was the very small amount of piano instruction I had as a child helpful? Don't know. I think those that have had at least a year or two as children have something to come back to if they restart as adults. I don't have that, but that is water under the bridge. I intend to be playing the piano until the day I die.

Stub what a lovely story, and that piano and music class have also become something that you share with your spouse!

@rogerch thanks for this thread. What beautiful stories!

I don’t have an acoustic piano, and I don’t know if I will ever have one. But here is my piano story.
When I was five I saw a piano and a person playing it at my parents friends’ house. It was a Calisia upright, a Polish piano, now discontinued. Seeing my fascination with the instrument, the pianist was so kind as to let me touch the keys and show me how to play a simple tune. It was a mind-bending experience for me and a love at first sight. Since then, for a long time there was literally nothing I wanted more than to play the piano and I begged my parents to let me.

I remember that at one point my mum took me to a music school. There were entrance exams for six-year-olds. I remember a lady who played some notes on the piano and asked me to repeat the same sounds, first by singing and then by playing them. I don’t remember much more of the exam, only the blissful feeling when I understood that I had been accepted. It ended in nothing though, because I could not have a piano at home to practise - the noise would have been unbearable to my father.

Some fifty years passed, more or less. I had not given up my dreams about playing piano, but there were other priorities in the meantime (family, work, etc.). Accidentally, I read somewhere that there were now high quality digital pianos that you could play silently with headphones on. A digital piano was a solution to my deeply rooted fear of disturbing someone with my practising. So when my husband decided to buy me my very first piano as a birthday present in 2021, I asked him to choose a digital. I know that my Yamaha CLP 735 does not compare to those beautiful grand pianos I have seen on your pictures here, but to me it is a dream come true and the most wonderful thing I have ever owned.

I am a beginner, and will always be, I suppose. I started to learn too late (at almost 60) to become anything else. But I’m fine with it, as the only thing I do care about is the complete happiness that I feel when I sit at the piano, touch the keys, make them sound, learn to play, and immerse myself in this wonderful world to which my piano has the key.

@Pallas Thank you, I loved reading your story too

Rubens Bought first house, decided it needed a piano, so bought an old broken baby grand Pease from 1911,

Rubens, I have a photo graph of my grandmother holding me when I was a baby and in the background is her Pease upright.

And thank you all for the kind words. Everyone's piano journey is different, but somehow we all find our way to sitting down at the piano.

For me, I had always wanted to play the piano from a very young age but I didn't have access to one until I was 7. My mom had an old upright, but it was at her parent's house a state away since our house was supposedly too small. But when I was 7, we moved to a larger house with ample room and so my mom was finally able to retrieve her piano. I was obsessed with it and begged my parents for lessons, but they said no. So I decided to teach myself. I dug through my mom's music books and found some beginner books and learned how to read music, and then I found the music for Für Elise, which I thought was the most beautiful piece ever, and I taught myself how to play it. At that point, my paternal grandmother decided that if my parents weren't going to put me in lessons, she was. She had a friend who was a piano teacher and started me with her. It wasn't a good fit - even though I was a beginner, I was already more advanced than she expected and she couldn't adapt her teaching style to my needs. Finally, my mom realized I was actually serious about playing and so she found another teacher who was a much better fit for me. I stayed with her for years, until she could no longer teach due to her old age. I had two more teachers after her, one was another poor fit and actually kind of killed my love of playing. I took about a year break from lessons at that point, and then found my fourth teacher who brought me back. I stayed with him until I moved out of state.

During this entire time, I played on that old beat up upright of my mother's. It wasn't well maintained (though it did receive regular tunings at least) and was in pretty sorry shape, but I was lucky to have it. I never would have had the opportunity to learn without it. That old Thayer will always have a special place in my heart.

I started guitar lessons when I was nine, but I was very drawn to piano and switched after 6 months or so. All I had at home was a cheap/small keyboard (Casio?) so I couldn't really progress too far...the following year I started learning clarinet at school and that became my focus (I still play, 37 years later).

When I was in the 7th or 8th grade the adult daughter of a family friend was leaving the state to go to law school. Her piano would be stored in a barn unless she found someone to take care of it. My mom volunteered - this is how I ended up with a huge old player piano (with the guts removed) in my bedroom for 4-5 years. I don't recall the make. I started piano lessons again but that only lasted for a year or 2. I did not have the discipline to practice much; I just wanted to play what I liked. This is why I crashed and burned as a freshman in high school when I accompanied the choir. I would procrastinate until there was no hope of learning the music in time for the concerts. It was a humiliating experience (and my own fault of course). 

My grandma played piano and ukulele in a professional Dixieland jazz band. At some point in my early 20s I inherited her piano, a Kimball Artist's console from the 70s (I later got the ukulele too). It was a fugly shade of brown that just screamed 1975, but I thought the legs and music desk had a pretty design. I had that piano until 4.5 years ago. I had finally started playing/learning seriously, and I was not pleased with the bright tone or the fact that it took over 3 hours to tune and didn't STAY in tune very long. It was a difficult decision to get rid of it (just because of nostalgia), but I like to think that she would have wanted me to have a healthy instrument. So I bought a new ED Seiler upright that I love. The only issue is that the action needs to be removed and lubed every year or so because it gets creaks/squeaks when I use the sustain pedal. I need to have this done soon; I'm approaching the limit of my tolerance again.

Stub
Pease pianos are practically all destroyed by the ravages of time, sadly. I remember all the love and care I put into refurbishing mine, only to realize that the proper repairs would cost more than a new piano. But it had character, and a beautiful tone. It was from the Golden age of american piano manufacturing, where dozens (hundreds?) of makers were competing to make the best pianos. I know for sure that had my Pease been maintained properly by its previous owners it would have been a superb instrument to this day.