What is the hardest instrument to play? for me is the trombone, because you need to place the right position in slide to play the notes. and its mouthpiece is too large. and the trombone is heavy. if you're beginner, you can't play the note easily. example you're playing G instead of A.

What is the easiest instruments? for me is the piano and strings instrument.!!

Well, I am guitarist and I really think that guitar is one of the easiests instruments. If you play scales, you can use one type of fingering for all of them. You just move the fingers to another starting fret...

I haven't played any other classical instrument, so I can't serve with my opinion about them.

i found piano really easy to take up as an instrument, and it's the only one i regularly play, of all instruments i've tried it was definitely the easiest (for me)
everyone will probably have a different answer though

Piano's hardest for sight-reading I think. But its the easiest when getting to grips with theory as you have all the notes laid out.

I would say (although I've never tried playing it, but I've seen other people play it), the recorder is a very hard instrument to play because you've got to know where to place your fingers and which ones to push down. Piano seems quite easy, but as Boo Radley said, the sight-reading is quite hard.

i play the piano and i think its quite easy up to about grade 6 then it becomes hard.The flute is easier though i did up to ggrade 3 in 6 moths of playing.

Everyone will find different things easy or hard. So there isn't a definite "easier" or "harder" instrument. Plus, when you take up another instrument, you often find it easier than your first instrument, because you haven't had to learn how to read music and things.

i think the hardest would be organ becoz it can have more than 1 level and the pedals as well!

I think that the flute is quite easy becoz i taught myslef some flute but i am probably playing it wrong!

The piano is really useful, as the notes are there in front of you and it makes music theory much easier to understand. But sight reading is a nightmare... after you learn the piano, every other instrument seems easy because you only have to read one line of music at a time!

Very stupid question

Some people find things easier than others

I kind of bonded with the Piano, I don't really think it's too hard for me to play...but as nat put slightly harshly, people find instruments harder and easier depending on how they learn, what size they are, and a number of other factors.

When everyone says "it's a stupid question" - i don't think the question was asking for a definitive answer. It was asking for YOUR opinion. You do have opinions, right?

Anyway.. I find piano easy.. but guitar is impossible

Cut her some slack you people.. she's in the middle of 'A' levels........

If you think about it, piano is actually pretty hard - you have so many things to concentrate on at once - two lines of music, chords, pedalling, dynamics, fingering and many others. Anakrron is definitely right - try sightreading on piano and it is hellish but try on something else and usually it's easy!

Sax is pretty easy, but self-taught. I also play clari, so it's not V hard.
Hard - probably oboe - I REAL begginer - it = hard!

AHHHHHHH = OBOE

i reckon the recorder is the easiest instrument (not ttreble and that!) and the hardest ... maybe the bassoon or oboe.

I'm taking my grade 3 flute next week and so i find playing the flute very easy! i've only been playing for almost 2 years and i skippd grade 2, I also play keyboard and can play recorder, oboe, classic guitar and bass guitar!

I think any instrument is hard if you want to play it well & I mean really well not just reasonably good.
I'm not long back from a lesson with a professional flautist -we worked on breathing , tone & a bit on articulation - I'm totally shattered & I didn't even actually play a piece of music. There's a difference between being able to get a tune out of an instrument & really play it.

I've just picked up a helpful little book by Kenneth Bell: 'A Woodwind Teacher's Flute handbook', and he keeps re-iterating his motto: the flute is the easiest woodwind instrument to play badly.

I teach very few beginners; most of my students come to me after school lessons, with bad habits already formed. Because correcting these habits requires dedication and hard work, a lot of them resist my suggestions of ways of improving their sound.

I'm working on one or two problem aspects of my own playing at the moment, and know how much patience is required to correct hand position etc.

You want to try self taught pianists....



I had one like that...

My 'favourite' at the moment is one of my sixth-formers, who started the year complaining she couldn't get the high notes to sound. I know why (she rolls the flute in too far), I've told her why, but will she change? Will she heck!

Very true!

Some are inherently harder than others, though, even in the early stages. Received wisdom is that the French horn is the most difficult because of the amount of puff needed, the closeness of the notes and the sheer technical wizadry involved in playing. It's a beautiful instrument, though - not that I can play it! The oboe has the reputation of being the hardest woodwind instrument and I admire anyone brave enough to tackle it.

Piano is ok to sight read.

Wonder how easy will my viola be to sight read...?

the easiest instruments are only easy to start a flute may be easier to start and you may progress faster but by about grade 5 all instruments are equaly difficult
in the keyboards the easiest would be a piano and the hardest an organ which has 2 staves for keyboards and one for the pedal boards and there are stops swell pedals and up to 5 manuals the easiest strings instrument to start would probably be the cello or bass and the most difficult a viola because of a unique cleff and its just as hard to play as a violin only bigger easiest wind would be a flute and the hardest a basson because of the enormous amount of breath used and 13 keys operated by the thumbs but as i said these are only the difficultys for starting

But if you want to be really good at an instrument, you have the motivation. OK, it may be hard if you analyse it but it doesn't seem hard as you're so eager to be good? So it seems worthwhile?

Organ! Without a doubt!!

two hands AND two feet doing different things

try playing music set out on at least three staves (and sometimes four) lol

thank you! as a french horn player, i know how hard it is to pitch notes and use loads and loads of breath! playing a scale without any valves! thats pretty special. anyway... going from viola to violin is quite tricky because of the differnt sizes etc... anyway, thats my opinion

~Choddy~

Very true - and it's actually possible to get along quite a way with those bad habits intact, but still be accepted in orchestras, do ok-ish in grades, and so the very fact that you can toddle along for ages doing it means you can reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeally ingrain those bad habits!

eeek

You have a teacher though don't you nat? Which helps a lot! Plus all the advice from on here!

Technique is terribly easy to just miss out on on the flute. I am STILL sore, after some 8 years, at the teacher who took me for a year in school - should not have been *allowed* to teach flute. When I had to go to a new teacher to get me up to standard for A Level (had to go from dodgy technically appalling grade 4 standard to grade 6 in about 6 months) I spent the first month or two just unlearning some of the awful technique he taught me I'm just glad I was forced to do my A Level recital on flute, or I would never have moved teachers and my technique & tone now would just be dreadful... not that it's amazing or anything, but it would be just BLEURGH!!!

No I teach myself

Oh! For some reason I had it in my head that you have lessons... d'oh!

Well in that case, take ANY opportunity you can to have an experienced teacher, or failing that an experienced flautist, listen to and watch you play and make sure you're not learning in a bunch of technical errors. You do have the advantage of being at a high level in other instruments, but there are an awful lot of things with tone production and stuff that if you START right, you'll make life a lot easier for yourself later on, and you will avoid having to unlearn all sorts of awful habits.

You have an advantage with your musical background, so use it - listen to yourself and keep an ear out for intonation problems, and if you can, do tone exercises and long tones to improve your tone. The flute is often said (and in my limited experience it holds true) to have the simplest fingerings of all the woodwinds, or the most logical anyway! - the hardest thing is probably tone. So while learning scales etc is good, and harder pieces, you will do yourself a lot of favours by working on tone, and playing simple pieces WELL, with as fabulous as you can tone, now.

A bit of work and a few pointers from someone who REALLY knows what they are talking about now will really stand you in good stead and will save a lot of grief later having to ungrain deep-seated bad habits (take it from someone who has been there ) - oh, and be sure to learn all the correct fingerings, ie things like RH little finger being on, and taking your LH index finger off for D2, etc etc, another set of bad habits that can be amazingly hard to break (been there, too...!) and that is something you can make sure you work on without any help, as you no doubt have the fingerings in books etc yep? Those are two habits which are very easy to fall into, and for D2 thing for instance sounds fine and not that different from the correct fingering until your tone improves, and that ironically is when it starts to sound horrible (I never used to believe my teacher when she said she could tell the difference with the correct fingering, NOW I know what she meant...!), so if you let yourself "get away with it" now then it will cause problems later, but if you insist on the correct fingering to yourself now when the difference may or may not be that apparent, then at a later date you will be grateful you did!!! It's only really recently that I have actually heard the difference with the RH little finger on or off in the 2nd octave too - I always thought that was simply a balance issue or just teachers being unecessarily pernikity, but now I can actually hear the difference even though it's not a huge one... shows how far I still have to go lol...

well anyway I've waffled a lot, but... I know you're doing flute for fun rather than for serious study at the moment, but I would really encourage you to get a bit of help with the basics, and to do some tone work to get as good a sound as you can and keep improving it, because that will definitely raise your enjoyment of playing it, and making sure not terrible habits get too ingrained (who knows, you may have none!!!) means that if you decide to have lessons or something at a later date you won't do what I had to do for my A Level and spend a whole bunch of time unlearning stuff before you can move forward.

I once had a flute teacher who didn't HAVE a flute (she was in fact a clarinetist) and I did no technique for the first 3 years, and when I moved to secondary school, and got a new teacher I had to relearn a lot. My fingering was wrong, and I had a flute that was falling apart...I did Grade for on an awful flute and got my arpeggios and one piece only2-3 weeks before my exam, although I did play another piece for a year before doing it...Thank goodness It was only 3 years...

What really annoys me is when ALL my friends (who obviously play the hardest instruments ever) go on about how easy the flute is and how I am actualy not 2 grades above them, but, because of the ease o fmy instrument, I am around 2 Grades below my actual standard...Hmmph. This kind of talk gets my goat. There are different things about each instrument that are both hard and easy.

According to an *old* Guiness book of records (1979 I think) they said it was either the oboe or the french horn.

My personal list includes
Organ - multiple staves and hand/feet co-ordination
Oboe - TINY windway!
Bassoon - LOADS of thumb keys
French horn - getting a decent sound and range out of a tiny mouthpiece
Recorder - complex fingerings and dynamic control (if it even exists!)
Violin - tone, techniques, positioning of fingers, tuning etc

IrisH - LoonY

Voice. For both categories.

I think that all instruments are actually equal in many ways. In piano, you need to focus on both hands, but when you play a string instrument, there are other factors like intonation.

Voice is probably one of the hardest instruments to play, because it is your body's instrument and so much more difficult to control.

I would think that flute is also pretty difficult. I attempted blowing into a flute once, and no sound came out because I did not blow in the correct way...I believe something related to embouchure.

Guitar easiest.

Trumpet hardest.

I KNOW!!!!!!!!!! i play oboe and i find it really hard!!

O and btw i dont think any instrument is 'easy' to play well..... if i had to say one, then probably piano because it's so much easier than oboe, but even so i have to work hard on piano to make it sound good!!

musicmouse
PS i like smileys!!

Um woodwinds have it easy... you blow a note and its there! with the violin, you have to have such a good ear. the violin is by far the hardest

although I suspect the piano is the easiest of all the instruments to play badly. Not because it's the easiest to learn but because it's very easy to self-teach or badly-teach and get everything totally wrong. Honestly, you should see the stuff I do from transferring students!

i totally agree with you! there are so many mistakes u can make on violin. like tuning...if u get a note slightly out of tune, it can sound awful. especially when ur playing in 6th position! wind players just dont understand. another thing is tone quality. a violin played badly sounds worse than any other instrument.
and lets not 4get all the techiniques u have to learn, like vibrato, pizz, tremolo or double stopping. i rest my case. the violin is the hardest.

I disagree with you on that. A flute is not easy to play, and even harder to play well. Also, oboes are a pig to get in tune, recorders may seem simple but they're very complex. The list goes on. You cannot generalise and say which instruments are easy or hard, it comes to down to the individual, what their strengths and weaknesses are.

Depressed violinist - if we're going down your road, there are hundreds of techniques all instrumentalists have to learn. As I am a flautist, some techniques we have to learn are vibrato, double tonguing, triple tonguing. You can also learn extended techniques like flutter tonguing and jet whistles!

The cello can be straightforward at times, but unpacking it is so much hassle i would love to play the harp but it looks so complicated

Chaos_91 - Yes, when I see people with big instruments unpacking them/trying to get them on buses and things, I am thankful I have a flute!

I play cello and it is very hard to carry around! My Mum has a Nissan Micra. Well we all know what will happen when i try to get it in!!!! lol

i agree with deperessed violinist

At the end of the day, we don't have much cxlue unless we've played a bit of everything!

I don't think that you can find out which instrument is the hardest or easiest to play. All instruments are hard and easy in thier own ways.

I think piano is easy for beginners compared with other instruments but i'm not saying it's the easiest. All instruments are hard to play, I suppose. Perhaps violin or any other instruments from the string family are the hardest.

hmm, I think it really depends on your "natural" instrument, I mean, I believe that everyone has an instrument they take to naturally, i.e. for me it's singing and flute, but I find piano extremely hard, it is the sight reading possibly, but also the coordination of the two hands (And i'm a dancer also, so my coordination isn't too bad ) I play the keyboard okay, but I just can't get the piano! I'm desperate to get with it though, because I'd love to teach singing (Which I have done, but it's better if you can play piano) Flute, I've only just started learning and I'm learning grade 3 pieces already, and I find it pretty easy, violin I found very hard to begin with, almost as hard as the piano! And I still can't play it well, Clarinet - i've enver had a lesson, and i've only just got a clarinet, it took me AGES just to get a decent sound out, but now i've got the hang of that and i've learned some of the fingerings i'm finding it easier, cello is ok, i have't really had enough lessons, but I think having violin experience has definately helped, and Singing, i've always been able to "sing in tune" and it's my first love!

woah, sorry..that turned into a huge explanation!!

Laura x