The decision to learn to play the piano, especially for adults, often comes with a lot of angst. Many people who contemplate learning to play the piano, can often talk themselves out of taking action because they are convinced that learning will be too hard and it is really beyond them.
Playing the piano is considered one of the hardest instruments to play. I’m not so convinced of that. I do understand that reading piano music can be quite complex, simply because there are several instruments that quite literally play one note at a time. One of my kids plays the tenor saxophone and another played the trombone. From my perspective, their music looks very easy, almost too easy, but that is from the perspective of a piano player and not from the perspective of playing those two particular instruments.
I do acknowledge that reading piano music, is harder than a lot of other instruments. However, you may be choosing to learn to play popular, modern music, in which case, you don’t actually need to learn to read music. If you are wanting to learn classical or jazz, then just like everything else that you have ever learned throughout your life, you learn a little bit at a time and gradually expand your knowledge.
I think the so called experts are wrong about playing the piano is a hard instrument. When a person is playing the piano, they are coordinating both of their hands at the same time and sometimes they are adding in some footwork, that is like an optional extra. Woodwind and some brass instruments are not only coordinating both hands, but they have to coordinate their mouth and breathing as well. I personally think that the hardest instrument to play would be the pipe organ because they often have both hands and both feet all coordinating at the same time. I also think that playing the piano is not so hard because it is easy to produce a decent note – you simply press it down. Many other instruments have to do a whole lot more to produce a decent sounding note, like violins, flutes, clarinets, oboes, trumpets, trombones, guitar and harp, just to name only some of them.
Learning to play the piano is either easy or not and it really matters on your perspective – if you think it is going to be hard, then that is likely to be your experience, but if you take a different perspective, especially a perspective where you don’t look at the big picture, but only small sections of that big picture, then you are more likely to find learning easier.
So whether you find learning to play the piano easy or hard, depends on your perspective.