Practicing piano and fooling around in a DAW are completely different realms of music related activities. The pianists all know have given me the impression the activity is many more parts stress if the goal is practicing to be able to play a challenging piece, while working in a DAW can be more like splattering paint on a canvas when done like the parent comment describes

Ok. I just expected musicianship to be musicianship regardless of the instrument.

The difference here isn't the instrument, it's musical composition vs performance. You can compose and edit piano works in a DAW, or you can perform those piano works on a piano.

I have been producing music as a hobby for around 25 years. There were maybe two songs where I had to put some effort into practicing the parts I was recording. Maybe even just one.

The hard parts for me are finding good arrangements, making stuff sound good in a mix, writing lyrics, finding ways to do certain non trivial things in my DAW, reviewing what software I want to purchase, ... Stuff like that.

It doesn't involve much focused dedicated practice. It's just too general of an activity, and it's very easy compared to playing classical pieces on a piano.

Well, musicianship is musicianship, but that doesn't say much.

But how fun/relaxing it is can differ between instruments and between genres (baroque vs folk or blues) and approaches (e.g. strict sheet music interpration vs improvisation).

Also working with the DAW is more like composing, arranging, conducting, and producing/mixing than playing an instrument.

I've been playing piano for ~25 years. I pretty quickly gravitated away from learning existing pieces towards composition and improv. I'm slow at reading sheet music and can't sight read, but for playing new songs I can generally just look at the chords and get something at least close enough to sing over right away. Just messing around making stuff up is a lot more relaxing than learning by rote I think. Of course I'm never going to play Piano Concerto No. 21 so it depends what you want out of life. :)

The best example of "relaxed piano playing" I can think of is actually the old Build Mode music from The Sims[0]. I'm 90% sure that all those piano tracks are just someone messing around improvising over a few simple chords, because it sounds so much like what comes out when I'm doing the same kind of thing.

Now, it's always a little stressful to record that kind of playing because if you play something bad sounding then you'll have to start over (or at least, splice multiple takes together), but if you're just playing the piano for fun, I think it mostly is relaxing.

Have you ever tried just playing some chords in the left hand and kind of letting the right hand do what it feels like?

[0] Here's Build 3 for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gGHQicQUw4

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Edit: Looks like that YouTube video actually links to an article which confirms my old suspicion that it's improv piano:

> "When Russo and Martin couldn't quite capture that wistfulness themselves, they called Burr. A successful jazz pianist in his own right as well as a highly sought-after session musician, he was comfortable working off of Martin's ideas (and, unlike Russo, he was a pianist by trade rather than a saxophonist). Burr says he loved the cut-and-paste style of recording that Martin employed. It was a case, he says, of "just looking at Jerry and asking, 'Does this sound like what you want?'" So, while Russo went away and worked on his pieces only to see them chopped up by Martin, Burr was happy improvising."

Learning pieces is usually frustrating for me, playing improv is relaxing and fun. I have definitely optimized toward improv rather than reciting songs. I have a bag full of chords, progressions, and scales, and I do whatever I want with them. I'm not trying to record an album, so I'm not too fussed that occasionally it's a little incoherent or wandering. I'm just trying to enjoy the act of musicing.

Do you ever improvise or play from lead sheets? I feel like it's a different feeling from reading sheet music and many people find it more enjoyable. Personally I'm a fan of playing along with stuff here https://chordu.com/. It definitely isn't perfect but it works.

>I've been playing piano for 50+ years. Still practice every day. Play in amateur recitals. It's fun, but hardly relaxing. It's a lot of work, concentration, and study.

Perhaps you play classical or learn pieces and paly them as is? (as you speak of "memorization" and "note-by-note and phrase-by-phrase analysis").

Try something like jazz, improvisation, etc - it can be inifinitely more relaxing, and much less taxing (you study to get the general technique for something, and then you can apply it in any way you like, be lax about it, switch things around, and so on).

You are playing real music where as I am just noodling around.