Contemplating getting a digital piano to relearn how to play

Flashfall
Sun, 01 Jun 2025 19:59:47 +0000

I learned to play piano when I was pretty young and my parents wanted me to learn an instrument. Real acoustic piano, music theory, private tutor, recitals, the works. I stopped playing after high school and my lessons ended though, mainly since it felt like it was just another chore and I wasn't enjoying it or playing pieces of my own volition. It's been over a decade since then and most of my free time has been in video games instead. The piano's still there but it's been just another piece of furniture for the most part. I've never seriously considered dusting it off and trying it again, and I'm pretty sure I've forgotten everything I've learned at this point.

Recently though, I got the chance to play Taiko no Tatsujin in an arcade for the first time while in Japan and I enjoyed it a lot despite being a total amateur, and I wanted to go back and play more to get better. That's when a thought crossed my mind - if I could gamify piano playing too, wouldn't that be a good way to trick myself into learning and enjoying piano again?

So I did some digging into what gamified piano software was around now, and Piano Marvel seemed to be the one most suited for being both beginner friendly and also for sight reading. The software itself offers a fair bit of beginner content for free, with the more advanced stuff behind a subscription. You can also connect it to a digital piano to track key presses and score your performance, which is the important gamification part that sets it apart from me just pulling up some YouTube tutorials and trying to follow them.

So I did some digging into digital pianos to see what would work for me learning and budget wise. From what I could glean off of various subreddit and other forum posts, if the end goal is to learn piano and not keyboard, an 88-key with weighted keys is the only thing that comes close, which bumps the cost up to a minimum of about 400 USD for the cheapest decent one, a Yamaha P45. If I didn't have a piano that cost would be fine, but I do and it most definitely sounds better, I just can't connect it to software or plug headphones into it so I don't bother my family if I'm playing at night, and I kind of want both of those. I'm also slightly concerned that my parents might be a bit upset if I do get a keyboard since, again, there's a perfectly good acoustic piano right there that they definitely paid more than 400 bucks for, though I imagine they'd be happy to just see me take an interest in learning piano again.

The most important part of this is that I actually commit to it and play regularly, since it'll all be for nought if I lose interest or turn it into a chore again and stop playing after a few weeks or months. I don't know if a gamified piano software will actually do that for me or if I just don't actually like playing piano after all, but I would like some thoughts. Is there other good software for relearning piano in a fun way? Any keyboard recommendations, preferably not too expensive? Am I being a coward and should I just use my acoustic piano instead?

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Comments: 21