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we inherited my grandmother's organ. I remember turning it on. the keyboards did not work but the pedals did. (no stops were engaged). I remember being astounded after 'fixing' the keyboards on the organ.

Someone gave us a piano and I toyed around on it for several years. Lots of friends taught me little songs and I could play tunes.. lots of the songs from Schuam (like Hannah from Montana) but not read music. I learned some Hanon by ear. I took lessons from 7 to 10 - i was so raring to go. I won a city wide competition.. (Rondo alla Turca on the symphony stage). My teacher moved and i was teacherless (except for Chopin and Bach) till age 48. I played the organ in churches from age 12 until off-and-on now.

I had a great boyfriend in college who won a spot to play a concerto with the Chicago symphony. We played duets.. he gave me a repertoire to learn... taught me quite a bit. We learned how to play Katchaturian's tocatta on matching pianos.. I don't know how we achieved synchronicity... I guess it was his skills. When I moved back to KC, I bought a 1914 Steinway upright for $1800 (i bet that dealer was glad to get rid of it).

It was actually a fantastic piano).

I ALWAYS have had delusions of grandeur. I thought I was going to be as famous as Horowitz. ha ha

For Alzheimer's Prevention, I take classes at the community college. One semester I signed up for music theory, it sounded interesting. And it was. But there was a co-requisite to take a group piano class. I liked that a lot.

Our neighbors were moving and didn't wish to take their heavy Gulbransen upright so down the stairs to our basement it came. I had just begun violin at the school where we went so notation was familiar to me. I was 7.5 years old when I began. Going stronger than ever now.....running out of time.

rada

Because I fell in love with it :-) And I went through some road blocks...
When I was 12, I entered in a musical program in school and played clarinet in the wind orchestra. We also had group lesson on keyboard because it's visual. This is when I fell in love with the piano.
Then my parents bought me a small keyboard at Costco (at age 13). I borrowed my grandmother's piano books and spent hours on it everyday trying to play Fur Elise and other stuff. After the keyboard, it took me 2 years to convince my parents to buy me an acoustic piano and they bought a crappy 100 years old one (at age 15). And it took me almost another year to convince them to take piano lessons. When I was young, I had a little organ toy and played some songs I heard on the radio. I wish my parents would have noticed I was attracted to the keyboard instruments instead of trying to make me like what they liked. My parents don't like classical music, my mom doesn't like the piano very much. Some days I had to stop practicing because she didn't like the pieces my teacher chose or she thought I practiced too much. Today I'm 33 and now that I bought myself a new piano I enjoy practicing everyday :-)

I watched the movie Secret and was really interested in the Chopin Etude Op.10 No.5. I then started to listen to more of Chopin's works, spending more time on this than schoolwork ing piano.even! By the time I memorized all of his etudes, I wanted to start play

For me, my parents started me and my sister on Piano lessons when I was 8 years old. I continued playing for longer than my sister, but I barely got into intermediate. For our son, my husband always wanted one of our children to play the piano, and when our 4th and last child was 8 years old my husband insisted that he learn to play the piano so I reluctantly got out my old piano books and showed him the basics and he had very informal learning until he was 10, when he started with a teacher but as time went on it became more and more apparent that he was talented and really wanted to play, and he passed me up by a long shot when he was 12 and now he has a top teacher and is super serious about it at age 15 (almost 16). He got us into classical music, we didn't listen to much before he started playing it. Here is a video of him and his sonata class partner playing at his academy's winter concert this year. Not perfect, but they just had to play such a difficult piece.

Kreutzer Sonata

This is my story......When I was 7 my mom bought a piano. My sister and I studied with a neighborhood teacher. I hated it and quit after 3 lesson. Then went to a Yamaha school, I also hated after 3 lesson. When I was 11 my mom bought a Lowrey organ, my sister started first, for she had had enough with piano. Three months later, I joined the lesson. For any reasons, I really enjoyed learning how to play an electronic organ. I surpassed my sister within a year. I studied organ till advance level, and competed in the national level etc. Moved to US long time ago, and no organ in the US, so I started playing piano without a teacher. Finally, after 16 years without a teacher, I found a teacher who is willing to teach me.

When I was very young, I would listen to Horowitz, Rubinstein and Pollini playing Chopin and I fell in love with their aristocratic approaches to music. They're still very much my models, especially Rubinstein.

My Grandmother and mother both played the piano. My Grandmother had very little training, and very little knowledge, but she LOVED music and could plunk out the melody from some Broadway shows and improvise a little accompniment. She wasn't any good, but she LOVED it with all of her heart. My mother and aunt were given lessons as kids with a good teacher, but neither loved it or had a real aptitude for it. My mom could play, but it didn't mean that much to her. When I was a small child,if we were at my Grandmother's house, I was at the piano. I had no idea what i was doing...pretty much just pressed the keys. but...I loved it like my Grandmother did. Now, as an adult looking back, I can't believe that she did what she did...but she GAVE ME HER PIANO. My grandmother, who LOVED music, gave me her precious piano. I was probably about 8 years old when grandma's piano arrived at our house. I'm in my 50's now, and although I now have a much better instrument, I still have Grandma's Sohmer Spinnet that she bought in the 1940s. Once I had the piano, there was no turning back.

What a touching story.

Because I just love it....

Because my sister did. Competitiveness and little else.

Learning to play the piano was definitely my choice. I asked my parents if I could learn to play the piano when I was 5. I still can't remember why I knew I wanted to do it. My parents bought an old upright piano and set up lessons with a teacher in our neighborhood who also happened to be a good friend of my godmother. I don't ever remember being forced to practice. I always looked forward to my Saturday morning lessons at her house. She was also our church organist.

At age 9, however, I think I was a bit overwhelmed and my mother asked me if I wanted to take a break from the piano. I'll never forget this because both of my parents seemed to understand my needs and allowed me to say what I felt. I was not made to feel guilty about this. In fact they allowed me to participate in a program in our elementary school in which we were allowed to take instruments home on loan, and have weekly group music lessons at school as part of the regular curriculum. This allowed me to continue studying music. I played the clarinet into junior high school.

We still had the old upright piano at home and I found myself playing the old songs I had learned earlier. One day when I was practicing on the piano my mother came in and asked if I was ready to go back to the piano. I was thrilled! I never asked. They seemed to know. I was ready. My earlier piano teacher had died, however. And my parents found me a marvelous teacher in the neighborhood who taught me to play classical music.

I'm lucky to have had the parents I had! I'm glad I got to tell them that before they died.

Last year, I bought an Android tablet. One of the free apps I downloaded turns the screen into a basic piano keyboard. I started playing with that and found it soothing, relaxing. The app is limited to the tiny screen.

That app motivated me to buy a Yamaha keyboard, and here I am. I am enjoying the process. I never thought that learning harmony, and playing chords was something that I might enjoy. For many years, I was a melody only person, and most of that spent playing in one key (key of D, over ten years on whistle, over five years on Irish flute).

I inherited a Kawai upright from my grandfather's estate. That, plus the fact that almost everybody in my elementary school took piano or somoe other instrument. The fact that two of my best friends were actually good at the piano gave me the motivation to keep practicing so I can be as good as they were.

I kinda was born into it. My Mom, sister, and grandfather play piano, and my aunt plays the organ. I remember listening to my mom play moonlight sonata when i was like 5, I thought it was so beautiful. Unfortunately we moved away and had to leave the piano. So I didn't start playing until I was 16, when I got my first Digital Piano.

I started at age 12 or so on the accordion. That lasted for about six months and then I switched over to the organ. I bought a new Yamaha U1D (I believe that was the model, a 48" top of the line in the US at that time) and never looked back. I was 21 and that was 1971.

I majored in college on classical organ and played weekends in trio playing a B3. The piano became more or less full time when I became a big band piano player in the military at age 24. I've only had 20 or so classical lessons from two different teachers.

When I was a child, about 7-11 years old, we had a toy that was like a laptop keyboard without the screen. It had the letters in it in alphabetical order and under the letters there were the numbers from one to ten. It also had some mode thingies. For example in one of the modes, when you pushed a letter, a mechanical voice told you a word that begins with the letter you pushed (A is for ape, B is for banana...). In my favorite mode it turned the numbers into a basic keyboard (white keys only). It also played some songs like Mary had a little lamb when you pushed certain letters. So, I figured out how to play some simple pieces with the thing. Then I asked my parents for a toy piano as a christmas present, and instead of a toy piano they bought me a 'real' keyboard. It had unweighed keys and only about five octaves, but that's the thing with which I played for the first couple of years. I figured out how to read sheet music and began to take piano lessons next autumn after I had got the keyboard.

Hm, well I've played piano my entire life. I just remember my parents singing me up for piano lessons and bringing home a piano one day, sort of. I was 4 or 5, maybe. I fell in love pretty quick but eventually stopped lessons because I wasn't learning music I wanted to and didn't want to practice "stupid stuff." But, luckily, a few years ago, I think when I was around 15, I got interested again and Chopin is what sold me. I immediately started on Waltz Opus 34.no2 [gorgeous when played by Horrowitz] and I was captured by his expression of emotion in his melodies along with the complex harmonies. Then I got into Beethoven and Bach. Also I started taking music classes at the community college near me while I was in high school and theory absolutely captured my heart. So I'm a composition major now! But, what's cool is that now, 5 years after I decided to take this seriously, I'm finally at a place where I'm learning those difficult chopin works [nocturnes and etudes] and Beethoven's 10.no.3 was the first sonata I listened to and loved and finally this semester my teacher let me tackle it! I learned piano mostly by ear when I was younger, very little music reading. My technique got to be REALLY good, but I couldn't read music at all. I could improv like no other though and began writing simple stuff while I was young, but again, no sheet music. So my struggle still is sight reading and not just playing the piece how I hear it but how it's written. I still find there's very little my hands can't do once my eyes make since of what's going on. I'm getting better!

We had a piano in the house. I was a child therefore I pressed keys and made a noise! At some point piano lessons started. I suspect that my Mum had something to do with it, but I don't really remember.

As an adult coming back to it I didn't really have a great focus that prompted me to come back to it. I had this vague idea that it would be nice to play again. Having a go on my parents' piano again was nice. I saved a little and bought a digital piano that I thought was good enough to last a bit. And here i am.