A fun tech-related project is hooking up an addressable LED strip to a digital piano and making the strip respond to your key presses - via a Raspberry Pi.

My repository for this (code finished, just need to add photos and add a write up about how to use):

https://github.com/whyboris/Digital-Piano-LED

I added a feature that the left and middle pedal buttons navigate through sheet music (PDF left/right button). And I'm also running Pianoteq which makes any (even dinky) digital piano sound like a $100k grand piano (or any piano you pick for that matter) https://www.modartt.com/pianoteq

Very nice, looking forward to seeing this working. While you're at it ;) How about a modern day version of the Moog PianoBar? That would be a real game changer for people studying using acoustic pianos. They now have to install a very expensive silent piano system in order to get midi-out. If you could just stack a bar against the fingerboard to get midi-out that would be amazing.

Update: I coded-up a full-screen visualization to display on the screen. My setup has a 55" screen right above the piano, so there's great potential to make a pretty show.

Still WIP, but easy to edit: https://github.com/whyboris/Digital-Piano-Visualization

I used Processing because of how easy it is to use and how performant it is for smooth animations.

This sounds really cool, looking forward to your pictures.

Same, but classical guitar. Less tech in my life please, thanks.

Same, but Electric Guitar. Coding is just another hobby for me right now.

Use a metronome.

I've been astounded by the number of free pianos I see on Facebook marketplace. I totally get the allure (and used to play a bit myself), but I fear it's a dying art.

Don't underestimate the number of digital pianos that are being sold, they don't have to be tuned regularly which substantially reduces the cost of ownership and they tend to be a lot smaller and easier to move around. The quality of the latest batch is excellent. I have both an acoustic and a digital one and to be fair the acoustic is half a century old and sounds better up close but for practical reasons I find myself playing the digital one much more often using headphones so I don't disturb others.

Even so, you are right, it is definitely not a growth market by any stretch of the imagination, it takes a ton of effort to learn how to play and in a world full of distractions and ready made music more than you could ever listen to in a lifetime the enthusiasm for doing this is waning. There are exceptions to this though, for instance, in Asia where playing the piano is a status thing and still in its ascendancy phase.

A piano, if not cared for. Is literally just a liability after a while. Most people have to pay to get them taken away. I wouldn’t consider this an indicator of the art dying. Cars go to junk yards too, but cars aren’t dying.

Any tips for getting started? Should I do lessons? How can I motivate myself to practice when I could just be browsing reddit?

Mind sharing resources you’re using to learn? Also do you have background in music theory or is this from scratch?

I built pianojacq.com to help me practice sightreading and to keep track of where I'm making mistakes. It is still far from perfect but quite useful. The main problem is to get the pieces I want to practice into MIDI format, but there is a wealth of MIDI files out there that can be used with a little editing.

I have this pipeline where I take a youtube video, download it as an MP3, convert that to MIDI and then edit that midi to split left/right and to ensure it is all set to time and of the proper length so I can show it as sheet music.

I knew next to nothing about music theory when I started this beyond the very first basic stuff, but after watching many youtube videos on the subject and reading a lot of stuff it is starting to make sense. This is a subject that is overcomplicated to the point that it seems much harder than it really is, there are only very few good teachers out there to make that which looks complicated but it ultimately relatively simple simple again.

If you want I can do a write-up of all the resources that I've used over the last year and a half.

Currently practicing Ennio Morricone's "Chi Mai" arranged for piano.

Progress is still slow but if I compare my sightreading spead, accuracy and general quality of play with a year ago the difference is huge even if you can't see it day-by-day. Each new piece brings new challenges, and teaches me something that re-inforces the pieces that I already know how to play which then all get a little bit better.

Overall I'm having a ton of fun with this and the joy I get from playing a piece end-to-end without mistakes, at speed and in a way that is nice to listen is hard to describe.

It's obvious that an experienced pianist would probably laugh at the level of my accomplishments but that's fine with me, I'm enjoying this and that's what counts. It's also one of very few things in my life that I've done without any commercial goal, and which is just for myself. Overall if I could do this life over I'd tone down the business career in favor of making more music. And the programming skills came in handy while making pianojacq.com, so in a way this allowed me to combine two things I love.

I'm on the same journey with the guitar, highly recommended, was one of the key things that improved my life during the pandemic -- and still excited to keep at it afterwards.

Piano has also been my go to this pandemic. I've also been finding a lot of joy in applying my programming skills to music as well. What are you using to convert MP3 to MIDI? How accurate is it?

Either this: https://piano-scribe.glitch.me/ or my own cobbled together piece of software. Depending on the content anywhere from 80 to 95% accurate, good enough to get you started and typically the errors are reasonably easy to deal with because of repeating patterns.

Not OP but I'm going through "Alfred's Basic Adult All in One Course" book series. It assumes no prior piano/theory knowledge and is one of the most recommended books on r/piano.

ooh! I'm doing exactly the same! I purchased a Casio and started taking lessons. So happy to learn!

I'm assuming that's a PX-S** series and I've looked at those, they are very good value for the money. Track your progress, make some videos and then look at yourself a couple of weeks or months later so you can see in a very concrete sense how you are progressing, this is a huge motivator, and it is easy to keep track of this on a day-to-day basis.

Yes, nailed it! Got a PX-S1000 because it's hammer action and I love the minimalist design.

Will absolutely do this :) I'm so down to see my progress as I go. Today I had my class and started working on some chords!

Cool, mail me if you have questions, it sounds like we're roughly in the same bracket. [email protected]

best!