Purchasing a keyboard for your 2nd Year of Let's Play Music

If you have not yet purchased your keyboards for home practice, look here for detailed information or see the tips below.

The minimum requirements for your Let's Play Music experience are:

• The piano or keyboard must have full-sized keys.  Your child will build muscle-memory reaching the exact distance between 2, 3, 4 or more keys - those distances are exact.
• The piano or keyboard must have at least 5 octaves (61 keys).  Your child will have enough range to play everything in the LPM curriculum.

Electric keyboards are used by most teachers in class.  If you choose to purchase one for home, they can be found at yard sales, on Craigslist, at black Friday sales, and at many stores.

• Since keyboards don't need tuning, you probably won't run into a "bad" used one, but it is a good idea to download a free pitch pipe for your smartphone and check that the keyboard is tuned.
• The 'master tune frequency' should be at 440 Hz. On some keyboards this can be changed and make your keyboard seem out of tune.  Some keyboards also have transpose functions or pitch bender wheels or joysticks- if these get damaged, your keyboard will be out of tune.
• Although rare, a faulty cable could change the power delivered (and resulting sound) resulting in an out-of-tune keyboard.
• In our classes we rarely use the myriad of fun programmable functions, except in 3rd year when playing ensemble pieces like "Song of Joy".  So choose a keyboard that makes you happy.