I want to learn piano...

Should I just buy a cheapo Casio portable keyboard, or would I be better off getting a decent usb MIDI keyboard controller and some kind of virtual piano software? Would there be any latency issues if I did that?

Also, is 61 keys enough for learning the basics? Thanks for any advice...

Thom Yorke doesn't want you to learn piano.

What about getting a piano?

Ask yourself what's important to you? Do you want a keyboard that feels like playing piano? Or do you want to learn to play keys? If you want the piano feel, you may consider an inexpensive portable piano. That's why I bought the YPG-625. I use it to "learn to play piano." If you don't care about the "piano feel" or the full keyboard, consider something else? Just playing the basics will not land you at the extreme ends of 88 keys very often. But you may decide that the feel is important. Or you may not.

My first year of learning was on a casio. It was good to use something cheap to see if I could stick with it. It was always fun to play. Then I got a real piano from someone for free (more common than you would expect).

Check out a used Alesis QS keyboard. I just picked up a QS7.1 on craiglist for $200.They have decent piano sounds.

QS8 / QS8.1 / QS8.2 have 88 key weighted hammer action. The 7 has semi weighted.

+1

There are frequently inexpensive pianos on craigslist.

Yeah, I looked, a few people are just giving them away as long as you pick it up yourself. Not sure if I really have the room for an actual piano at the moment, I think I'm gonna start off with a cheap keyboard and eventually upgrade to a digital piano or the real thing.

Again here we go with bad advice.

Haha! "Back the hell away from my KEYS, man..."

I started out with a "porch piano" that I got for free (had to learn how to tune it), and also practiced on my synths. Didn't take long to realize that using something as close as possible to a real piano was the way to go. I finally settled on using the old upright part of the time, and a Roland FP-8 the rest of the time. I usually don't like Roland gear much, but that one spoke to me.

Try practicing on someone's piano, as well as other keyboards, and see which has the results that appeal to you. After all, you are going to enjoy practicing a lot more if it's on an instument that feels responsive to you.

One major point that I had was how the instrument responds to key velocity. If it doesn't respond close enough to an actual piano, it made things much less pleasant. If you are going to invest a fair amount of time & money on lessons, might as well get a good instrument for the tast while you're at it.

Good luck with the lessons. I found that learning how to handle a piano helped me a lot in playing the synths, opened up whole new areas to explore.

I'm currently "learning" on a Casio WK-110. They're about $200, but they aren't weighted keys. It does have touch sensitivity though, so that helps.

Personally, I find that I use it more for synth settings than anything. I'll use a piano setting now and then, but even for those I'm running it through a delay or two and possibly a modulation pedal as well.

I get lessons on a regular piano, and honestly, I have no trouble switching back and forth between the non-weighted keyboard and the normal piano.

I suggest that you figure out what you really want to learn. If you want real piano sounds, and want to play normal piano stuff, try to find a cheap piano on Craigslist or something. I see them go for cheap all the time because people hate to move them.

However, if you're more interested in synth sounds and all sorts of weird noises, it may be better to look into a decent keyboard with lots of synth settings, or an actual synth.

Just note that just because you go to a real piano, doesn't mean it's an upgrade.

I consider my digital far superior to a bunch of crappy old "real" pianos I've played.

You've said that before. I do know that there are lots of cruddy old pianos out there, but there are lots of very nice ones, too. It may be that old Australian pianos generally suck but I'm not sure that's the case for old European or North American pianos. (Old pianos that sucked when they were built still suck, decent pianos seem to hold up unless they've been abused.)

I have a very nice digital setup (a MIDIBoard running Pianoteq) but I still much prefer to play my funky old 1912 upright. Why? Probably because it's producing real sounds in the real world rather than pushing them through headphones or speakers. It's just a richer, more organic sound.

I have a Microkorg, but it doesn't exactly have piano tones, and the keys are tiny.

Doug - I doubt there's any such thing as an Australian piano.....

That's interesting. I wondered if there may be a serious difference in Australian piano history and elsewhere. Here (in Canada, but likely US, too) pianos were a prized status-symbol from (I'm guessing, not a historian) about 1900 to 1930 and virtually every city had a piano manufacturer or two. Even Kingston, current population 100,000, had a piano factory.

But these pianos were very modular. These factories didn't have forges, so they must have bought the harps and strings and probably the keys and hammer assemblies, too. They might built the box and assembled the thing. Many of the piano makers came over here from Germany. The result is that most pianos from that vintage (that I've run across) are either pretty decent or they're just ruined. (It also helps if the piano is a 'brand name' like Heintzman.)

Later pianos are a different matter. The whole process must have changed after WWII and with those pianos, the quality is variable indeed. My part of Canada was settled around 1800 (largely by colonists who remained loyal to Britain during the American Revolution and were, therefore, driven from their homes and land in the aftermath) and industrialised somewhat later, so there are quite a few turn-of-the-century pianos kicking around for free or cheap in old turn-of-the-century (toc) houses.

My piano, for example, is a 1912 Gerhardt-Heintzman (a nephew--not quite up to the original, but pretty fair) that I bought for $400 out of a toc farmhouse and had moved to my own toc house. A perfect fit. (These houses even have what I call a 'piano wall' in the front room--an inside wall exactly the length of an upright piano.) It needed some fixing but, with the original cost plus moving plus repairs and tuning I have a wonderful gospelly-sounding "upright grand" (big, heavy upright) for about $1000 that gets played for hours a day. It might be the best purchase I've every made. And there are lots more out there if anyone is looking.

But not, I guess, in Australia.

There's really no right answer... if you get crappy keys to see if you'll stick with it, you might quit because the keys are crappy.

Maybe consider buying a decent used, weighted keyboard (you'll recover most of your money if you sell it) or renting one until you know if piano is for you?

Do you know what your musical goals are?

I tried once to learn on an XP-50 Roland about 10 years ago, non-weighted keys. This lasted about a month or 2 and I lost interest. I just , 2 1/2 months ago bought a used spinet, real acoustic piano, for 400.00 and I loved it from the first day, I did have it moved for 200 and tuned for 75.00. I would recommend definitely getting weighted keys and I personally have been especially pleased with the real acoustic piano, just seems more inspirational and authentic and makes me want to practice more, can't beat the real sound but yet you sacrifice mobility. I have a friend who teaches piano on a Yamaha digital piano, he said was around 700.00 with weighted keys that he says feels and sounds like the real thing , it has built in speakers he said, this is what he gives lessons on and he's been playing for 35 years so it must be good I'm sure and has different sounds and I think midi capability. Without the weighted keys on my roland xP50 there just wasn't that real feel to help inspire my desire to learn. Though I still use the Roland for adding instrument parts to music. When looking for a real piano, make sure you test every note and if there is any single one that sounds terrible like 2 separate pitches on the same key, a real bad twang or the note relative to the adjacent notes is way out relative to them,, don't buy it , it probably has a cracked pin block which is very expensive to repair. If the piano has a distorted sound like a bad speaker when you play it don't buy it as this would indicate a glue joint between the sound board and one of it's braces is loose, this would be caused by extreme humidity exposure.