Do you need a real piano to start, or is a keyboard enough?

The three that matter

88 keys. A shorter keyboard — 61 or 76 keys — runs out of room. Standard repertoire uses the extremes; a student on 61 keys eventually has to transpose passages to fit, which teaches the wrong thing. It also means the hands never learn where they are on a full instrument, so every lesson on a real piano starts with re-orientation.

Weighted keys — and specifically hammer action. This is the one people get wrong, because two different words get used as if they meant the same thing. Touch sensitive means the sound gets louder when you press harder; nearly every keyboard sold today does that. Weighted means the key itself resists your finger. Hammer action goes further: a small hammer attached to each key reproduces the mechanical resistance of a real piano, instead of a spring pushing the key back up.

The difference is not about feel for its own sake. Dynamics — playing softly on purpose, and loudly on purpose — are built in the fingers against that resistance. A student who learns on springs has no control to transfer when they sit at a real piano; the notes come out either absent or shouted. Graded hammer action adds one more layer: the bass keys are physically heavier than the treble, as they are on an acoustic.

A sustain pedal. The cheapest of the three and the one most often skipped. From the first months a student needs to hear notes continue after the finger lifts; without it, half of the repertoire simply cannot be played as written.

What that costs, roughly

Entry-level 88-key instruments with a basic hammer action start around $300 to $500. Around the $500 mark you get 88 fully weighted keys that behave much more like an acoustic. That is the honest floor: below it you are buying a keyboard the student will outgrow, and re-buying in a year costs more than buying once.

What you can ignore

• Hundreds of sounds. A student needs one good piano sound. The other 499 are a toy, and they are how a $400 budget becomes a $400 keyboard with 61 unweighted keys.
• Built-in rhythms and accompaniments. They cover up timing problems instead of fixing them.
• Recording features and screens. A phone records better than any of them.
• Furniture. A stand and a bench at the right height matter; a wooden cabinet does not change a single note.

Two things that cost almost nothing and change everything

The height of the seat. This is the most common problem in a first in-home lesson, and it is free to fix. Sitting too low drops the wrist below the keys and the fingers start pulling instead of pressing; sitting too high does the reverse. The forearm should run roughly level with the keyboard, elbows a little in front of the body. A dining chair is almost always too low, and a stack of books under a child is a legitimate solution.

Headphones. The reason a digital beats an acoustic in an apartment: a student can practise at eleven at night without a conversation about it. In a shared home, headphones are often the difference between twenty minutes a day and twenty minutes on Saturday.

In New York that is not only a matter of courtesy. The city’s Noise Code treats music as continuous rather than impulsive sound, and between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. a violation occurs when the sound is 10 decibels or more above the ambient noise level — a threshold an acoustic upright clears without trying. Outside those hours the limit is stricter still, and a neighbour can report it by calling or texting 311. Practising in an apartment is perfectly legal; practising an acoustic piano at 11 p.m. in a building without soundproofing is a complaint waiting to be filed. Carpet, sound tiles and mutes help. A weighted digital with headphones removes the question altogether.

Across the river the rule is built differently, and it is worth knowing which one applies to you. New Jersey does not use a relative threshold; it sets absolute limits — 65 decibels by day and 50 decibels at night, from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. Jersey City goes further and names musical instruments specifically: playing one in a residential neighbourhood so as to produce 65 dB(A) measured at twenty-five feet or at the adjoining property line, between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m., is a violation. A relative limit forgives a noisy street; an absolute one does not.

And if you live in Hoboken, read this twice. Hoboken’s quiet hours do not start at 10 p.m. on a given night — they run from Friday at 6 p.m. until Monday at 7 a.m., at 50 decibels throughout. That is the entire weekend, which is exactly when a family with a busy week assumes it will do its practising. A weighted digital with headphones is not a compromise in that town; it is the only instrument that lets a student practise on a Saturday afternoon without a neighbour being within their rights to complain.

Buying a used digital: what to check

A three-year-old digital at half price is usually a good deal, and it takes two minutes to verify:

• Press every key, one at a time, softly. A key that only sounds when hit hard has a worn sensor. Any dead or uneven key is a repair, and on a digital a repair often costs more than the instrument is worth.
• Hold a note and let it ring. The sound should fade smoothly, not cut off or crackle. Crackling usually means the speakers, which is fine if you use headphones and annoying if you do not.
• Check the pedal is included. It is the part that goes missing between owners, and buying one separately is an avoidable $30.

And a used acoustic piano?

A used upright can be the better instrument and the worse purchase. The price on the listing is rarely the price: moving an upright is a specialist job, and a piano that has not been tuned in years may need more than one visit to hold pitch — sometimes it cannot be brought back at all. Before paying for any acoustic, it is worth having it looked at by a tuner, not by the seller.

And there is a second cost the listing never mentions: getting it in. An upright weighs between 300 and 800 pounds. A local upright move in Brooklyn runs about $350 to $600, and every flight of walk-up stairs adds roughly $50 to $150. Brownstone stairwells are frequently 28 to 32 inches wide, which is barely enough for an upright on a moving board, and a grand sometimes has to be craned in through an upper window. Before you buy a $400 second-hand upright, get a quote for moving it to your floor — the move can cost more than the piano.

If you are about to buy, send a photo of the model you are looking at before you pay. Five minutes of checking beats a year on the wrong instrument.