Playing the Piano as a Music Technology Student

 If you've ever entered a music technology course completely blind, you might find yourself saying, "Why is it that we're required to learn the piano if we're taking music technology? I mean, this isn't what we signed up for!" Well, to tell you the truth, learning an actual musical instrument might be the key to having a successful career as a music technologist, and the piano in particular will be one of your most useful tools.

As a music technology student, you'll find yourself working primarily on a DAW - that is, a Digital Audio Workstation - where you'll be putting all your inspiration into in the hopes of coming up with a hit song (or a school project, who knows?). As far as I know, every DAW out there comes with a piano roll where you can manually place notes to make digital sounds.

Now, most newbies usually just wing it and place random notes that sound good together (which is a totally acceptable way of unleashing your creativity). However, once you gain a little bit of extra knowledge from playing the piano (or any similar instrument), you might find that it's easier for you to figure out where every single note goes and what you think the end product would sound like.

Having a piano with you while you compose on your DAW is also great for gaining inspiration. It only takes a few moments to go wild with the piano and let your inner thoughts flow through your fingers as you play. I personally use my reliable Yamaha P125a to supplement my music compositions; the variety of sound texture it gives me inspires me to come up with ideas, both traditional and innovative.

Conversely, if you find that you want to keep pursuing the piano, you can use your music technology experience to enhance your piano-playing. Your accumulated knowledge of recording, mixing, and mastering would be of great help as you start composing and playing pieces exclusively for the piano. For more information, here's a short read that might give you more insight as to how piano and music technology can work together.

Also, here's what the aforementioned Yamaha P125a sounds like in action.