Starting out/keyboard question

Hi, Mela Bala! We are happy to see you here, in our community!

Mela Bala wrote: Hello,

I am currently overseas but my husband purchased a keyboard so we can start teaching our son with Soft Mozart. I am concerned because it has 76 keys and am wondering if this will be too many keys and confuse our 18 month old son.

76 keys is not such a bad idea! It will last you for many years ahead! The only problem I see is how strong is your son's fingers to press the keys since they are most likely touch sensitive and require some effort to push.

18 months a little early age to start developing piano technique. I strongly recommend to start learning piano yourself and work in preparation games. Our members placed many files in our Share section and it is going to be very helpful for you to start.

I also recommend you to become friends with Sonya softmozart.com/profile/990-mrspost.html
She is also teaching her 17 (now 18?) months old son and would be a source of experience for you.

As soon as my husband finds a desk appropriate for the keyboard and a top shelf for the laptop he will purchase the perpetual program. Any tips on how others have set their music areas up will be greatly appreciated.

I personally used to have a real table for monitors and purchased a tables with adjustable legs in Wal-mart in the camping section. It worked excellent for me!

The model of the keyboard he purchased is:
Yamaha YPG-235 76-key Portable Grand Graded-Action USB Keyboard
Thanks in Advance

I think, you are very lucky to have such beautiful instrument!

OH yes that is a lovely keyboard! You will need to work on finger excersizes a bit to get his finger strength up. But starting as young as you are it's about music knowledge as much as piano practice, so by the time he is 4 his fingers will be stronger than supermans! Also he can play with his strongest fingers for the time being anyway.
Our setup is a strong narrow table from IKEA ( about $90) we sit the laptop on top of the key board, it's nice and close and I can line it up to centre easily. A little table to hold it up a bit would be nice....but having it close is more important to us. We had it on a solid camping table $30 but it was ugly And I now have the keyboard in a room visible from the front door, so it has to be pretty consider putting your piano on a low table so your son can stand up to play, it took my boy (3.. Now 4) a while to actually sit down to play. This obviously won't be ideal if you plan to learn yourself!
Having 76 keys will not be a problem. Make sure you buy the solfege stickers and just stick on a few at a time starting with one octave in each colour. Since your son is young I recumbent you don't show him that the stickers can be moved and that you run A line of clear sticky tape down the piano over the stickers and then cut between the keys....or have a spare set of stickers handy! Lol the stickers are considered essential by all the brillkids mums