Does playing the guitar hurt your piano playing?

Hello, I'm Robert Estrin, and this is livingpianos.com and virtualsheetmusic.com with a viewer question. Does playing the guitar hurt your piano playing? This is a great question and I'm glad to address this. I've had similar questions about playing different musical instruments and different styles. For example, does playing jazz hurt your classical playing, which you can reference that video?

My personal feeling is the more you assimilate musically, the richer musical experience you have to offer in all your music. Now, in music conservatory, I actually majored in piano and French horn. That's right. I always felt that epiphanies I had in one instrument always translated to the other.

Guitar and piano are very different instruments. They share one aspect that is quite unique among musical instruments in that they have a rich polyphony, that is, you can play many notes at the same time on both the piano and the guitar, which is unusual among most musical instruments. However, the piano offers a visually very easy way to understand music theory because of the half step arrangement of the keys, whereas guitar is a little bit different because the strings are tuned at different intervals to one another.

I could see that the piano could be very beneficial to the guitar. How could the guitar possibly be beneficial to piano playing? One thing is that on the piano once you strike a note, with the exception of what you can impart tonality-wise with the pedaling, the tone is right there and there's not much you can do with it. The guitar, you can bend notes. You can impart vibrato. There's all sorts of expressiveness you can impart in your playing.

Why does that translate to the piano? When playing the piano, you must imagine these things and be able to try to get some sense of these type of alterations of tone with what you can do with voicing and pedaling.

The long and short of it is play everything. Sing your music. Compose. Play different styles. Improvise. Sight read. Do it all. The more you do, the better musician you're going to be. Yes, one activity translates to another.

Thanks for the great questions. Keep them coming in to robert@livingpianos.com, and this is also virtualsheetmusic.com. Thanks for joining me, Robert Estrin.

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

Thank you for your comment, question or request!

Comment/Question deleted successfully.

Post a comment, question or special request:

Comments or questions must be between 3 and 10,000 characters long.

You may: Login  or  

Otherwise, fill out the form below to post your comment:

Add your name below:


Add your email below: (to receive replies, will not be displayed or shared)


For verification purposes, please enter the word MUSIC in the field below

---