I can't really afford a piano so I was going to settle for a keyboard. Will a 61 key yamaha digital piano would suffice. I also plan on takietaking lessons for a few months to learn the basics and fundamentals. What would be a decent rate per hour to pay? Thanks guys!

my advice. If you have a local community college take a keyboarding class there. its cheaper and you get a whole semesters worth of lessons that you would be paying hourly for with private instruction.

but with this method you also have to be a little more diligent with practice habits imo.

i wouldnt take a 61keys one but go straight go for the standard 88 one since you will have to buy it one day or another. I'm sure there are some cheap ones out there...
for private lessons I take 18euro/hour at home, 20eu if I have to move but I only give private lessons and non declared ^^ , I'd go in the music school of your town/ city, It's much cheaper there tbh.
About practise, it's at least 30min a day otherwise it's not really useful... and teachers hate it when their students don't work ^^

False.

nope, i can explain and anw the more u work the fastest you progress.

This post was edited by unid_element59 on Nov 5 2012 02:09pm

That is definetely true.

But what I understood from your text, is that if one practices less than 30 minutes, its better not to practice at all. That would mean, that you start learning only after the 30 minutes checkpoint.

In my opinion it's allways worth spending the time practicing, even if its just 10 minutes a day. The lenght of the session doesn't prevent you from learning something, and even in 10 minutes you can learn something critical that you didn't understand yesterday.
But naturally more is more, no need to point out the obvious. I encourage my students to practice AT LEAST 10 minutes a day, instead of not practicing at all. If a beginner practices lets say 60 minutes three times a week, and 10 minutes for the rest of the days, thats 220 minutes in one week. For a beginner that's quite a lot i would say. But this is just my opinion

Well actually it depends a lot on the student and the difficulty of the piece... i.e: Gifted ones will learn in 10 minutes what a "non gifted" (I don't like that word) one will learn 30.
I think 10min isn't enough though: brain and physical mecanisms haven't worked enough (in my opinion) to assimilate enough the exercice to create the needed automatism for fluidity etc...(proprioception <- not sure if it's the right word in english ) . I'm not saying you don't learn anything in 10mins but that there is a better benefit doing 1x30min than 3x10min. Tbh I don't do 30 minutes, I do 6hours but I do it as full time studies and for a professionnal goal. Each time I spend on a technical part of a piece takes me at least 30minutes (for maybe 2-4 measures) and for the few times I did only 10, I had to start over the next day ^^

This post was edited by unid_element59 on Nov 6 2012 07:34am