There seems to be an ideal age for learning to play a musical instrument. For the violin, my understanding is about the age of 5, the guitar is when the child is physically big enough to be able to put there right arm over the body of the guitar and be able to reach the strings. With learning to play the piano, I have consistently heard that around the age of eight is the best time to start.
Even though I am a traditional classical piano teacher, I am also a bit unorthodox and have different ideas from the mainstream. I don’t agree that 8 years old is the best time to start, after all I started learning when I was just 6 and it never did me any harm. I have also heard of many other kids start to learn the piano when they were at the age of 5 or 6 and they had no difficulty learning. I do know of someone who didn’t start their chosen instrument until they were 14 years old and then went on to have a career in music.
Here’s my point – I don’t believe that there is an ideal age to learn to play the piano, or any other instrument. I have held the opinion for a long time now that the best time to learn a musical instrument is when the interest is there. If you start before that spark of interest happens, then you are not going to stick with learning. Conversely, if a person waits too long after they realize they are interested in learning, then they could easily get discouraged and give up before they even begin.
I don’t think that this just applies to kids, I believe it applies to adults as well. Maybe someone who learned as a child but quit before they really got anywhere was never truly interested and maybe it was their parent or parents that were the ones really keen for the child to learn. Maybe the true interest didn’t happen until well into adulthood. I know that I’m talking about a lot of maybes here but I think my conjecture might actually be valid in some circumstances. I challenge you to think about it – what is true for you.
So it is probably obvious that I think any time or any age is a good time to learn to play the piano, even if it is in retirement. The proof of this is because I take the time to write this blog especially for retired and senior people!
If you are wanting to learn to play the piano, I encourage you to find a way to make it happen as it is truly never to late to get started. It is definitely not the case that if you don’t learn at the ‘ideal’ time, you can’t learn. To put it another way, there is really no perfect time – or maybe the perfect time is now.