Anyone who knows the way to play either guitar or piano, or even both, is very admirable. In fact, these two instruments are elite civilizations of mankind and each instrument has its own beauty. And this brings us to one major question – Learning guitar vs piano, which one is actually better?
Instead of making controversy, this article will guide those who are still unable to make up their minds about which instrument to pick up. If you have a bee in your bonnet over this issue, let’s find out the answer right now!
Learning Guitar Vs Piano – The Similarity
Guitar and piano have many things in common
The correlation between guitar accompaniment and piano accompaniment is chords. Chords on both guitar and piano are the same. The way to create the C chord is a typical example.

This chord is made up of 3 notes: Do – Mi – Sol. If you have known where to find the Do – Mi – Sol notes on the guitar, then with piano, it takes less time to get used to this chord.
Learning Guitar Vs Piano – The Differences
Sound Area
A piano consists of 84-87 keys, equivalent to 7-7.5 notes whereas guitar covers only a maximum of 4 intervals in 6 strings. Thus, the piano’s sound area is wider than that of the guitar, which shows more different notes and chords to enrich the music.
Structure Of The Fretboard
Each piano key corresponds to a specific note, the higher the right side of the piano, the higher the sound is. On each guitar string, each key corresponds to a note.
The guitar has 6 strings, which allows us to play two similar notes on different strings. However, you can’t do that with the piano.

Volume Range
With a large resonance box, the Piano produces a much louder volume than a plain guitar. The softness of the guitar sound is appropriate for playing in compact and quiet spaces that attract the attention of the listeners.
If you play the piano in a small room, it will be noisy and uncomfortable.
Challenges When Learning
With the piano, we use both hands to work on the keys connected with hammers and strings to make sounds. It seems to be easy but as you all know, there are no roses without a thorn!
The piano practice seems to be soft and emotional, but beginners often experience hard-handedness, which results in fatigue from the arm. In addition, learning wide chords is also a training challenge.
When playing the notes related to the black notes, it’s uncomfortable to scratch the nail for a while.
Otherwise, when playing guitar, your left hand is used to block the strings with the purpose of forming chords, while the task of the right hand is mainly to handle the strings with movements such as hooking or fanning.
After playing this instrument for a few weeks, your right hand may suffer from callus as a result of strong rub with guitar strings.
This is the biggest challenge for beginners. Sometimes the strings that are hooked by hands are twitched in the wrong way, which can lead to broken nails.
How To Decide
Size
A piano has a weight of about 250-300 kg, which may take up place in your room. In contrast, an ordinary wooden guitar weighs less than 5 kg and can be put into bags for carrying purposes. This portable compactness makes the guitar the most popular musical instrument today.
Reliability
The piano is much more durable than the guitar as this instrument is quite slender and decent. If you have a regular check, the life of a piano can be up to 20 years, even longer.
On the other side, the 6-string instrument is very prone to issues including string twisting – especially when placed incidentally at the wrong location or accidentally dropped. Guitar strings are also often lagged, leading to the situation that we often need to adjust the key to refresh the chord.

Cost
Buying a brand new guitar for less than $50 to start practicing will be much simpler than a second-hand piano costing over $200 million. Guitar accessories such as strings, hoops, guitars are also cheap and popular so you can alter another one if one of these items is out of order.
However, along with the fast pace of society changing, the piano is more and more popular as more households have more income than before.
Many rich families have invested in buying pianos, even the new ones. For them, the piano is not only an instrument to learn, but it is also a very significant and monumental decoration for the house.
Beginners can choose an electric piano, although the sound is not as beautiful as an acoustic piano, it is smaller and more carriageable.
Can You Learn Both At The Same Time?
Learning both instruments can be an interesting experience
There is a discussion about whether it’s fine to play both of them or not. Personally, it’s favorable for you to play just one first, then keep going with the other.
In fact, learning musical instruments is good and if you know many types of instruments, it will be better. Passion for music will help us improve the comprehensive development of skills like communication, personal thinking, sensuality of harmony.
However, you should not study many musical instruments at the same time because it is very difficult to achieve the desired results, especially when each instrument needs a hard learning process to master it.

So learning two or more instruments at the same time will put a lot of pressure on each person by practicing too much. Holding so many things at once will make your mind confused.
So stay calm and spend time learning each instrument first. Once you have known to play one instrument, it will be easier to learn others because now you have been proficient in the knowledge of music, rhythm, ability to practice fingers.
That’s why when learning a second instrument, it requires only a little more time to practice well.
Final Words
These are our suggestions for the question- Learning guitar vs piano, which one to choose. We hope that you will successfully conquer and have interesting experiences when practicing these musical instruments.
Now we guess that you have got your own answer. So, what are you waiting for? Go and chill with your choice!
A very well thought out and written article but above all, a very accurate article.
My son started out with piano at the age of six on a Steinway grand piano. He is now eighteen years old and completed his level 10 Royal Conservatory Music (RCM) two months ago. About two years ago, at the age of sixteen, he decided to pickup guitar. He practices everyday, two hours on guitar, and one hour on the piano. After one year, he is so comfortable with the guitar, and by the second year, he can play songs like “heart of life” by John Mayer, “demons” by Imagined Dragons, and “memories” by Maroon 5. According to him, those ten years that he spent on piano has really helped him with guitar. He has three guitars, a Martin D-18, D-28 and D-42.
During the covid-19 pandemic, he is spending about 65% of his time on the guitar, and 35% on the piano.