Electronic keyboards and pianos are not of the same origin at all. It's just that the keyboard area is the same.

The electronic keyboard is a symphonic polyphonic instrument. It’s a “one-man band.” Therefore, if you want to teach electronic keyboard well, you must understand the band.

To play the electronic keyboard, you need to understand the range, timbre, characteristics, uses, and playing methods of various instruments. For example, if you play the violin tone the same way you play the piano, or use the violin tone as accompaniment like you would on the piano, that's it. Because the range of the violin is not that low, and it is a melody instrument, and it has to be played while hanging and rubbing, and you cannot hit the keyboard, which is exactly the opposite of playing on the piano. You don’t need to learn this at all to play the piano, but you must understand it to play the electronic keyboard.

To play the electronic keyboard, you must also understand chords. This is a major feature of the electronic keyboard. It is often said that some people who have studied piano for several years do not know what a chord is. But I started playing chords in the first month of learning the electronic keyboard. As time goes by, I have accumulated a lot of things. So you give a classical or pop music melody score to a grade 9 electronic keyboard student and a grade 9 piano student. The electronic keyboard student will play the accompaniment in five minutes and can play it transposed, while the piano student is still asking: "Why?" What should I match this with? ”

Learning electronic keyboards requires the study of harmony. For example, in the key of A minor, when is B7 followed by E7, and then when should F7 be used instead of B7 followed by E7? For another example, what? When to use ConG and when to use C on E. This is a basic question.

It requires polyphony. An upright electronic keyboard has three rows of keyboards, so it can play at least three parts, or even five or six parts. The piano can generally only play two, or at most four, parts. In particular, electronic keyboards can be played with different timbres in the same range. This has never been studied in pianos.

It requires orchestration. For piano, the knowledge in this aspect is 0.

The electronic keyboard uses three aspects: the expression pedal under the foot, the volume setting and the touch strength of the hand to control the intensity. The piano can only be controlled by hand. This means that the electronic keyboard has greater expressive power.

Good electronic keyboards have aftertouch and horizontal touch keys, which are not found in pianos. Aftertouch means that the volume will change after playing the keyboard and then pressing the keys. The piano only works for a moment when you hit it, so the way you touch the keys is different. Horizontal touch is vibrato like the erhu.

When learning electronic keyboard, you also need to learn ensemble playing. Generally speaking, the piano can only be played with four hands at most. But in modern electronic keyboard learning, more than 20% of the students should be in ensembles. If you don’t create a four-person, eight-hand ensemble, it would be too unmodern. Such scores need to be written by the teacher himself.

There is also the use of sequencers, recording synthetic music, and doing MIDI, which account for 10% of advanced electronic keyboard learning. If you only know how to play the piano, you don't understand this part at all, so you have to learn it from scratch. Reverb, phase, chorus, balance, these all need to be paid attention to. So learning advanced electronic keyboard is not that easy.

Precisely because the electronic keyboard is its own system, it was established as a university major in the Conservatory of Music as early as 1990. Not to mention that it started late, electronic keyboards became a specialty only five years after they came to China, and pianos only became a specialty n years after they came to China.

There are 11 major piano competitions in the world, and they basically only compete on skills. However, in the world-class electronic piano competition, if you can’t arrange or compose your own music, you can only participate in the first round. Can't enter the semi-finals. Therefore, the advanced level of electronic keyboard is composition. The actual finger skills for the keyboard only account for less than half, so it is very different from the piano. It’s not that electronic keyboards are better than pianos, but they each have their own emphases.

Two final points. First, electronic keyboards are not necessarily cheaper than pianos. The electronic keyboards used by students in the electronic piano department of the Conservatory of Music do not have anything less than 30,000 yuan. For piano students, it is enough to have a piano worth RMB 20,000 at home. (Note that we did not say that electronic keyboards are necessarily more expensive than pianos)