What's your stance on cross instrument technique?

it's the concept that playing one instrument can boost technical proficiency in another

Many of the most advanced guitarists advocate piano as a good training ground for strength and dexterity alongside independence and low level, fast twitch sight reading


if Shawn Lane and Marshal Harrison say it then I'll believe it

Absolutely. I'm a beginning guitar and piano player and not an advanced one, but I think they make each other easier. A lot of things that piano teaches help guitar fall right into place; I've found trying guitar after studying some piano to be MUCH easier than before. There are also people here like Strat who have played a lot of guitar and so are much further along with piano after a year or two of playing than a total beginner to music would be. Cross-training is indeed a beautiful thing.

Also, a note about reading...the best thing for my reading was singing in a choir. Practicing reading AWAY from a piano, when you're not distracted by your hands, removes interference and you learn faster, so that keeping tabs on the score AND your hands is less of an effort when you return to a piano. Let's not forget choir: it's great cross-traning for anybody.

I play clarinet to an advanced level, and piano to an early advanced level, and the cross instrument training is really starting to show its benefits. In some exam systems, for the final certificate you need to fulfill a piano requrements for orchestral instruments, and then keyboard skills help with harmony, counterpoint and sight-singing!

My piano skills help me visualize the notes in the clarinet requirements (especially in dominant and diminished 7ths, and clarinet helps me with creating a very smooth legato line on the piano!

Meri

I play clarinet to an advanced level, and piano to an early advanced level, and the cross instrument training is really starting to show its benefits. In some exam systems, for the final certificate you need to fulfill a piano requrements for orchestral instruments, and then keyboard skills help with harmony, counterpoint and sight-singing!

My piano skills help me visualize the notes in the clarinet requirements (especially in dominant and diminished 7ths, and clarinet helps me with creating a very smooth legato line on the piano!

Meri

I played piano for four years and then decided to pick up guitar for fun. It was pretty cool to see how some of the things i would play on guitar would make "sense" when i played them on piano. Or how a chord progession would look on my guitar. Sight reading was simple when i learned guitar as well. I think my left hand may have been a little more coordinated than it would have been if i was not playing piano

playing percussion or kit as well as your 1st instrument is vry beneficial

Violin, viola, cello, bass, guitar.

I found that I could plug a small electronic keyboard into the hi fi and play the percussion beats through that with loads of bass, and that made it very easy to practice guitar, sax and clarinet along to the adjustable beat. I just got my first piano a few days ago and no doubt the beat will help with that as well.

Also I found that guitar was hard to learn until I got a clarinet and then a sax. The sax seemed to release some genie inside me that made me understand the theory of guitar notes in a way I didn't before.

So I think that certain instruments suit different people and if they start with the wrong instrument they may think they are not very musical. But when they find the instrument that suits them it can release their natural musical ability and then they will find that other instruments are very easy to play as well.

The fun thing about learning one of those before learning piano is that your left hand starts off with more dexterity than your right (even if you're right handed)

As well as playing several instruments I teach a number of students on a range of first through to fifth studies. I remain completely convinced that progression is faster on any instrument after the first study.

You aquire a lot of musical knowledge when learning the first study - the general knowledge about music if you like so when you learn your second instrument a good deal of the information you need you already have. The ability to read the notes, the basic concepts of how the instrument works and your aquired knowledge of general rudiments are already in place which frees you up to just covering the actual physical and practical approach to the instrument you are playing.

It is rather like learning foreign languages - people that speak multiple languages will often tell you it took them ages to learn their first language - maybe ten years or so (from a toddler to a teenager) The second language was probably learnt over four or five years at secondary school, and then any other languages can be learnt often in months afterwards.

I look upon the pursuit of each instrument like the development of a new language. Each new instrument progresses faster than the previous one up to the standard of that previous one.

Cheers