Comment by hobo123
5 days ago
Maybe guitar is easy if you only strum cowboy chords.
I used to play the piano and am learning electric guitar, and guitar feels way harder because there are 1000 ways to pick a note (articulation wise), bending, legato, plus the complexity of the fretboard vs linear piano layout.
Classical piano was hard mainly because there are sooo many notes to read all the time for all the different voices.
Piano is much harder. The fretboard is how I think about music generally, it is much easier to re-call intervals vs piano, I don't think either layout is particularly difficult to memorize though. There are a lot of ways to pick a note but you'll find 99.99% of them are wrong. That's one plus on piano, the most experienced and least experienced person can make the same sound relatively easily on it. I think the main thing is on piano you're often doing 3 things at once. On guitar you're doing "2" things. Arguably, the right (or left) hand isn't doing much at all so you don't really have to think about or practice it the same way one does on piano.
I agree there are a lot more little techniques on guitar that don't exist on piano but a lot of them are very easy to master in a short amount of time.
I think getting really good at either is a lot of work, but I can teach someone to play a recognizable song on guitar in a very short amount time, a few hours or less depending on the person, to play even "beginner" songs on piano can be weeks of practice for a newcomer.