The guitar and piano seem like the two most widely-used instruments. Is that because of their resonance?
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Piano – The best way we’ve figured out to layout every note in music in an accessible way.
Guitar – The most portable way to play chords while standing in front of a crowd and still being able to move around.
No one has yet mentioned that the pianist and composer [Franz Liszt](https://sv.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Liszt) helped popularize the piano throughout Europe in the 1800s. The piano, its usage, and its culture would probably not be as refined as it is today were it not for him. I’d recommend giving it a read.
Guitars are cheap, portable, and you can go from knowing how to play no songs to strumming chords for several in a day (bless you, guitar tab!). In essence, the perfect starter instrument.
Pianos on the other hand are built and patterened to learn how to read music. My mom mandated piano lessons for a couple years as a kid, just so my sister and I could read music later on in life should we decide to pursue piano, or any other instrument, more seriously. Thanks to modern keyboards, they’re also now a fraction of the price they used to be, though I prefer weighted keys on everything given the choice.
Bonus: gets professionally tuned twice a year instead of needing to be tuned every time you play, or never tuned in the case of keyboards, so a good sense of pitch isn’t necessary to the instrument.
Basically they’re two of the most versatile and easily accessible instruments. They can be used to play nearly any type of music, and they don’t require you to learn a special technique to even get them to make a tone like brass or woodwind instruments do.
The piano is also the most conceptually-simple melodic instrument in my opinion. You have the entire grandstaff laid out in front of you, left-to-right, in half-step increments. This makes the piano *far* easier to understand than most other instruments.
On top of that, a guitar is one of the most affordable instruments to buy and doesn’t need much space to store, so essentially anyone who wants a guitar can have one.
There are two primary reasons: They both have the ability to play many notes at once, and they can both be played while singing.
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