Which instrument should I start learning as an adult?

Adults give up instruments for practical reasons far more than musical ones: the thing is too loud for the flat, too big to leave out, or takes six months to make a pleasant noise. Choosing against those constraints rather than against a favourite record is the single best predictor of still playing in a year.

Step by step

1. Ask how soon it makes a sound you like.Ukulele, piano and keyboard produce a correct note the instant you touch them. Guitar takes a few weeks to fret cleanly. Violin, trumpet and saxophone take months before the sound itself is pleasant, and practising something that sounds bad is much harder to sustain.
2. Be honest about volume.In a flat or a shared house this decides everything. A digital piano with headphones and an electric guitar with headphones are effectively silent. A ukulele is quiet. A drum kit, a trumpet and a violin are not, and no amount of goodwill from neighbours survives daily practice.
3. Consider whether you can play it alone.Guitar, piano, ukulele and accordion are self-sufficient — you play a whole piece by yourself. Single-line instruments like flute, trumpet and violin are wonderful in an ensemble and can be lonely on your own without backing tracks or a group to join.
4. Think about where it lives.An instrument in a case in a cupboard gets played far less than one on a stand in the room you sit in. Size and portability decide how often it is picked up, and frequency is what makes progress.
5. Factor in your hands and your body.Large chords on a full-size guitar are hard with small hands, where a ukulele or a nylon-string guitar is easier. Wind instruments need lung capacity. Anything held up for long periods is demanding on shoulders and necks. None of these rules anything out, but they should inform the choice.
6. Consider the cost of the whole setup.The instrument is often the smaller number. An electric guitar needs an amplifier and a lead; a digital piano needs a stand, a stool and a pedal; a wind instrument needs reeds or a mouthpiece and regular servicing. Price the setup, not the instrument.
7. Check what tuition is available near you.Piano and guitar teachers are everywhere, which makes lessons easy to arrange and easy to change. Less common instruments may mean travelling or online lessons. Some adult education centres and community music groups run beginner classes very cheaply.
8. Try before you commit if you possibly can.A shop, a friend, a taster session, a rental. Half an hour holding an instrument tells you more than any amount of reading, particularly about size and comfort.

Tips

• The best instrument is the one you will pick up on a Tuesday evening when you are tired. Everything else is secondary to that.
• Adult beginners often do better with a group class than one-to-one lessons at first — it is cheaper, more sociable, and the shared struggle keeps people going.
• There is no age at which starting is unreasonable. What changes with age is that adults have less time and more self-consciousness, and both are addressed by short frequent practice rather than by talent.

Common mistakes

• Choosing by favourite recordings alone — The instrument you love listening to may be one that takes a year to sound tolerable in your hands, which is a lot of discouragement to absorb. Taste matters, but so does the first three months.
• Ignoring the noise question until after buying — It is the most common reason an adult beginner stops. If practice has to wait for an empty house, it happens once a fortnight, and once a fortnight is not enough to improve.
• Buying the cheapest possible instrument — A very cheap guitar with high action or a keyboard with unweighted springy keys is genuinely harder to play, and beginners assume the difficulty is them. A modest step up transforms the experience.
• Planning an hour a day — It does not survive a real week. Fifteen minutes daily beats two hours on Sunday for skill acquisition, and it is a schedule that actually happens.

Alternatives

• Ukulele: Cheapest, smallest, quietest, and the fastest to a recognisable song — four chords covers an enormous amount of music. Limited range and it will not satisfy someone who wants harmonic depth.
• Digital piano or keyboard: Every note is correct from the first touch, the layout makes music theory visible, and headphones make it silent. Weighted keys matter, it takes up space, and both hands doing different things is genuinely hard at first.
• Acoustic or electric guitar: Enormous repertoire, huge amount of free learning material, portable, and playable alone. Sore fingertips for a couple of weeks and chord changes are the barrier that stops most beginners.
• Tin whistle or recorder: Very cheap, immediate, and genuinely capable in traditional music. Loud in a small room, a single melody line only, and both suffer from being thought of as school instruments.
• Violin: Beautiful and expressive, and among the hardest to make sound good — there are no frets, so intonation is entirely on the player. Loud, and unpleasant for household members during the first year.
• Drums: Physical, immediate and enjoyable from the first session. Acoustic kits are impossible in most homes; electronic kits with headphones solve that and cost more.

Questions people ask