A piano is clean and open. Every note you can play is a key. A very pure, straightforward instrument. When you interact with it, if you pay attention, you can track exactly what you’re doing (pitch, length of notes) with relative ease. It turns that tangled mess of music in your mind into something linear, but recognizable: something you can share with others (and something that makes sense to you weeks later, when you’re a bit of a different person, yourself).
Maybe it’s because I had a piano first, but guitar is not like that at all for me. It’s very mysterious. I at first had to learn things very much by rote on the guitar–as a beginner, it’s easy to sound things out on a piano. If the note you want sounds higher than the note you just pressed, it’s to the right of that first one on the keyboard–and if you’ve had basic ear training, by a predictable number of steps. Things are a little less intuitive on a guitar, and you have to literally memorize about a third of the frets to get something similar from it. But on an elemental level, that can work–if you pick a note you like on the guitar, you may not remember what fret it is, and you may not want to do the counting to call it an A#, you know? You just mess around on the neighboring frets until you get something that sounds friendly to your ear, but is totally mysterious to that analytical part of your brain unless you specifically let the analytical bit out to play. (I am, of course, leaving out plenty about guitars that differs from pianos. You feel very connected to an instrument you tune yourself, by ear, for example, and that beats any warmup for getting you into the right sort of meditative state for playing. And all of the different sounds you can get out of a single guitar–a piano has dynamics, but that’s about it unless you want to damage the piano. Of course, that is enough for me; I love pianos, and the simplicity of working with pure tones and dynamics really works.)
After that experience with my guitar, though (the non-parenthetical part), I came back to the piano very differently. (And it’s very irritating to be itching to play a piano and not have one.) In my piano lessons (so long ago!) I had totally missed the point of memorizing all of those chords, scales, and arpeggios. Yes, I knew they were the “building blocks” of everything, and I could see how they related to the songs I was learning. But to me, “learning piano” meant learning to play songs that my teacher picked out. I didn’t make the leap to improvising arrangements to songs I knew based on those chords and arpeggios. And I definitely didn’t make the leap to letting the piano sort out all of those murky tangled bits in my head that might or might not be songs–or the fact that those chords were in fact merely a lens to view songs through. And I absolutely didn’t get that the piano was a lens to view songs through.
The guitar taught me a lot about those lurking, mysterious songish things in my head, because it seemed very much in tune with them, being pretty mysterious itself. But I’m not finding it easy at all to compose on. Okay, let’s face it, I’m lazy. I don’t have the patience to untangle the results I get on a guitar. It’s not easy to take a bunch of guitar frets and figure out what notes I was playing and put them on a musical staff. Nothing like as easy as the nice clear lens of a piano. Actually, the guitar is much closer to a funhouse mirror, which is unexpectedly discouraging.
