okay, so the other thread on buying a piano made me curious...

say i wanted to learn the piano, or perhaps the organ, or some other instrument that's large and expensive even at the low end. i can't just go out and spend £5,000 (or whatever a usable piano costs) just to see if i want to actually play it, and i assume even serious organists don't have a pipe organ in their house.

so, what would i do? just play in lessons and not practice to start with? find time on someone else's instrument? rent one? use a digital piano or keyboard? i assume the latter isn't an option for the organ--or do digital organs exist? can you learn basic manual skills on a keyboard or piano?

okay, that's enough questions for now.

(to be clear, i'm not planning to play the piano, just curious.)

You could hire a practise room out if you are near one, but i think a lot of people buy digital pianos, which you can get for as low as about £400, and keyboards are much cheaper.
Chi Chi Nwanoku (principal double bass of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment) started learning the piano at 7 by going to a neighbour's house!

For organ, if you find a nice enough church, you can use their church to practise, but sometimes you are expected to pay or play for services in return. Electric organs are rather expensive, so i doubt many people buy them.

I feel sorry for people wanting to learn the harp, there are very few teachers around, and very few places to go and practise, but i think you can rent a harp for a while until you buy your own, but from what i've heard, a relatively good one is around £5000, but i may be wrong!

Jacob.

I hired a harp when I started learning (and only bought one many months later when I was sure I'd stick with it).

Good quality digital pianos will take you to a decent level. Otherwise, there are practise rooms you can hire (at local colleges, music shop, etc). Also, some libraries have pianos you can use.

Don't know about organ...

ETA: Just saw that Jacob already mentioned all these; I must be 2 seconds too late

Second-hand lever harps generally cost about £1-2k and you can take up to grade 8 exams on lever harps these days. So unless you have your eyes on pedal harps, the harp is not necessarily more expensive than other instruments.

The organ forum suggests that most people find a tame church to practice in. I'd vote for checking out smaller chapels and RC churches which might be less likely to have official organists than some of the CofE places. I think most music colleges have an arrangement to use a specific church or concert hall organ, I'm not sure what provision they make for students' practice.

The piano - I actually think a lot of people have lessons because they have a piano rather than the other way round. I'm sure I've read someone here saying that they practice on a grand piano at work so I guess they turn up in all sorts of places.

What else is impractical in a financial sense? Maybe percussion - there's a lot of stuff to buy, or can you get away with just having a proper xylophone and a snare drum for practice purposes. I actually think things like double basses, harps and tubas are the most impractical, but that's more from the point of view of carting them around.

Digital organs exist
and Barry williams - a forum member has a pipe organ in his house
However alot of organists can only practice in the church, because of the price and size of a decent quality organ. Not to mention organs vary soo much, that really you need to practice on the instrument you play most with that, i should think atleast. No doubt I will be proven wrong

But anyway,
I had to learn for a few months on a keyboard, and then we bought my tutors piano. So i think depending on the instrument, is to rent for a while, or rent a practice room.

You're definitely right that percussion is a little difficult! Having a xylophone and snare drum is a good start, but then there are timpani, marimbas, vibraphones, multi-percussion things etc...! There's no way most people could afford everything, and have enough space for everything!

You can buy a perfectly serviceable used piano for as little as two or three hundred pounds. You might even get a good piano for free. Many people want to dispose of their family pianos (to free up space in a house where no-one plays) and find that - if it old, and it is not a Steinway, Bechstein, Bluthner, or Bosendorfer - not only can they not sell them, they cannot even give them away. Most people would rather see their old piano used and appreciated, rather than thrown away and scrapped, so a Wanted ad could turn up a nice surprise.

Also there are many ways to practice apart from on your own piano at home. For most of 2008 I lived in a rented room in Utrecht, yet I did as much practice as at any other time in my life. We are lucky here. There is an international cultural centre, and for a (small) annual fee you can use the practice rooms as much as you like. Most students only practice seriously in the couple of weeks before exams and/or concerts, so for most of the year demand is so low that I can get 4 hours a day (or more!) in the rooms if I want them.

When I was a schoolteacher it was simple to arrive early and use one of the school's pianos.

But when I was an itinerant contractor in the UK, working 3 months in one place, 6 in another, I still always found somewhere to practice piano without the expense of using professional practice rooms. Sometimes there was a piano in my place of work, and no-one ever refused permission to use it, so long as it was done early morning or late evening when it would not disturb the workers. Other times I had to be more creative, and more forward.

Examples include (all of these were in London):

A community centre where I studied language courses in the evenings. I was allowed to use the piano Mon-Fri for 2 hours each evening, in exchange for paying for it to be tuned and regulated as necessary.

A ballet school, where I used their baby grand for about an hour and a half before classes started three times a week - on condition that I remained for another hour and a half to play for the early classes.

A pub where I practiced every day in return for doing a 2 hour spot of pop and jazz songs each Saturday

A musical colleague (working at the same company) that allowed me to use her piano a couple of times each week


The general point is that if you really want to do it, you'll find a way.

Are there grade exams in organ? If so, how do they work, are they held in churches etc.?? Just curious!

I thought this thread was going to be about harps when I saw the title


Yep, the organ syllabus and regulatations are here.

of course!!!! there are so many more diploma holders wondering about in the country, more competition i guess....

i do love practising at different organs: helps me to adapt to the instrument very quickly.

Yes - when I did my (only) organ grade exam, many moons ago, an examiner travelled from North Wales to my parish church in the midlands to do the exam.