Differences between the electric guitar to the piano
By Michael Korte

In this article I want to shed some light on my perspective about how the electric guitar distinguishes itself from the piano with no expectation to be complete.

1) Electric Guitar vs. Piano
Producing a note is easy with the piano. Just hit a key and you hear a sound. With the guitar, you need to hold down a string to the fretboard in the right manner, which means close to the little fret stick, and then get the string in motion either by plucking it with your finger on your picking hand, with a pick or with a pull off with a finger on your fretting hand.
Also hitting multiple notes at a time is – in principle – easier with a piano, under the condition that you only hit those notes at the same time and do nothing else. When you want to play notes repeatedly, it gets a little inefficient, since you must press the keys for every note that you want to produce.
If you want to play a chord four times for example, you press the chord four times.
With the guitar, you just put your fingers to the fretboard ONCE and then keep strumming four times with your picking hand.
When you take that even further and you want to arpeggiate chords, this becomes even more effort, because with the piano, you press the keys every time you want to hear it.
With the guitar, once again, you just put your fingers in the right spot on the fretboard, forget about it and let the picking hand do the rest.

Sound
The sound of both instruments is produced in quite a similar way. Both involve a vibrating string, which is why they can sound quite close to each other, if you do not use any effects.

Usability
A guitar is quite easy to carry around with you freely and to use it anytime and anywhere you want to. (Unless you are flying with a specific British airline…)
Pianos, on the contrary, are very hard to even move across the room. Not to mention moving it to another room. I know this from… extensive experience.
Due to technical advancements, electric pianos could be reduced to the size of an arm span and to a weight of about 20 kg, which makes transportation a lot easier.
But the guitar will remain unchallenged in its transportability and spontaneity in usage.

Transferability
This is a point in which the piano holds massive advantages since the development of electrical keyboards. With the right software you now can have the piano simulate any sound you want, going from orchestra sounds to synthetic sounds.
So, if you can play the piano, you can do almost anything.
If you can play the guitar, you still got some benefits though. If you can play guitar, no matter if electric or acoustic, you can just grab a guitar that stands around and give it a go. Also, you have a huge variety of interesting sound effects for electric guitars.

Short term challenges
With the piano, in the beginning stages, it is easy to play your favourite melodies quickly.
But with the guitar, you first need to get a little bit of coordination down, because your left hand and your right hand MUST work together, unless you only want to play open strings.

Long term challenges
Coordination of both hands becomes difficult the more complex the pieces that you play, are, because you must coordinate two hands and with that ten fingers.
With the guitar, you are limited in a way, since there are only six strings, so you can only play six notes at a time and you mostly only use four of your fingers.
If you got at least some coordination between both hands, chances are, you will find this easier after some time.
One great advantage of the guitar reveals, when you are diving into improvisation and using scales.
With the piano, you need to learn every scale separately for every key, but with the guitar you just learn a pattern and if you want to play it in another key, you just shift it up and down the fretboard, to the place where it fits the key, you are playing in.

About the author:
Miika Korte is a guitarist and kitara oppetaja tampere from Finland, where he introduces adults to the joys of learning a new musical instrument.