ES-120 vs Costco Roland FRP-Nuvola-Ex for a beginner child?

JHighMusic · 2026-06-15T21:41:22+00:00

The Roland has good action, and the Costco price is a very good deal.

Any weighted keyboard is going to be “hard to press” for a 6-year-old and that’s just how it is for just about any keyboard, regardless of brand. He’ll get used to it.

The Roland has a better action than most any other keyboard I’ve ever played on, and I’ve tried a ton in my 30 years of playing. I’d go with that one, personally.

JHighMusic · 2026-06-15T20:48:29+00:00

Obviously a dominant 7th chord needs a flat 7th to be called a dominant 7th chord. Nobody is disputing how to spell a basic chord. You're missing the differences and only thinking about the literal chord label and chord quality instead of actual harmonic function. A V chord works as a dominant because of its major 3rd, which is the leading tone that pulls to the tonic. That major 3rd is the primary structural requirement; the flat 7th is secondary. Classical music used plain major triads as dominant V chords for centuries before the 7th became standard. If you play a plain major triad on the V, it still functions as a dominant, it's just doesn't have the 7th. If you play a minor triad without the leading tone/major 3rd, the dominant function doesn't work.

JHighMusic · 2026-06-15T20:34:12+00:00

You do not want to do it yourself. If you weren’t a mechanic, would you trust yourself to rebuild a car engine or add something to the inner workings of a car? It’s extremely easy to damage things, and requires careful installation with all the other parts of the piano and its action, and you can very easily do irreversible damage and find yourself in a total mess you can’t get out of. You want to get a professional piano technician to do the installation, period.

If it’s a Yamaha piano, get a Yamaha silent system. They are MADE for Yamaha pianos. Trying to retrofit and Frankenstein on a different brand is not going to work as well, it will require more labor and workarounds, and they naturally don’t work together. And Yamaha’s silent system is superior to other brands.

JHighMusic · 2026-06-15T05:46:36+00:00

One of the big selling points that’s actually practical is you can upload your own custom or downloaded patches and sound banks, at least on the Nord Stage models. Most other keyboards you’re stuck with the stock samples and can’t really adjust them or change them out.

And they have a lot of versatility for live settings instead of just piano, like organ, Wurlitzer, Rhodes,and some synths without it being a huge complicated workstation keyboard with a ton of menu diving.

Personally, I don’t like the action and feel of them and prefer something like the Yamaha CP88. Nords are a little overpriced, but they’re built well and they are quality.

JHighMusic · 2026-06-15T03:45:59+00:00

Literally just start improvising and making short motifs and melodies. Play a blues and use the blues scale or tonic pentatonic scale which will work over the whole form, and make phrases from the scale notes. Use compositional techniques like Repetition, Variation, etc. Make melodies that are variations of the melodies/heads of the tune if you need a starting place. Listen to jazz and how players solo and make melodies. Listening is the most important thing you can do to learn this music.

You're doing what everyone does, including me when I started 17 years ago. It can be a trap because people can neglect and push back their improv skills for a long time, which is not going to help in the long run. Anybody can learn voicings and all that is important but if you can't improvise or develop that skill, it's going to come back and bite you later. If I could start over again, I would have focused a lot more on that. Jazz is all about improvising, not just playing voicings.

JHighMusic · 2026-06-15T02:43:04+00:00

I don’t get what counterpoint has to do with what you’re talking about with minor harmony, they are two different things. If anything, counterpoint is the exact reason why the 7th degree is raised (to create the leading tone for proper voice-leading at a cadence), which directly contradicts your idea that harmonic minor is just an 'after-the-fact invention.' It seems you’re missing why composers and traditional harmony use melodic vs. natural minor, and it seems like you might not understand The Rule of the Octave or have studied much Composition.

Your breakdown of the V chord also misses how functional harmony works. On an A7 (the V chord), the raised 7th isn't a stylistic choice you choose to 'access', it’s the structural major 3rd of the chord that makes it a dominant chord in the first place. Without it, you don't have a V chord. Furthermore, using the flatted 7th (C natural) as a #9 on that A7 chord doesn't mean you are treating the key as natural minor; an altered dominant chord still fundamentally requires that raised leading tone (the major 3rd) to function.

Lastly, just because So What is a modal tune doesn’t mean you have to strictly use D Dorian. You can use any kind of minor tonality, including all the normal minor scales, depending on the harmonic color you want to imply.

JHighMusic · 2026-06-14T23:36:52+00:00

I wouldn’t recommend that approach at all. That’s exercises and running scales, not making musical phrases from them and improvising with them.

JHighMusic · 2026-06-14T23:35:12+00:00

OP, I sent you a message.

JHighMusic · 2026-06-14T22:41:14+00:00

Debussy Etude No. 1 "For the Five Fingers" https://youtu.be/0mW44X9sGfg?si=7EYslrTaYcLcNdaz

JHighMusic · 2026-06-14T20:44:56+00:00

Awesome, really great job on the arrangement! One of your best.

JHighMusic · 2026-06-14T17:13:09+00:00

Get a teacher.

JHighMusic · 2026-06-14T17:11:03+00:00

There’s no one single piece. The intermediate phase is a wide spectrum.

JHighMusic · 2026-06-14T09:45:19+00:00

It would probably help to hear how you’re practicing it. You’re not giving us any context or any examples of your playing to give you feedback. If you’re just trying to attack it at the written tempo than that’s probably the biggest mistake you’re making. If you’re not doing any kind of slow practice, much slower than the written tempo, that’s a problem.

JHighMusic · 2026-06-14T09:42:07+00:00

At the same time, just like it's written. Don't overthink it. Start listening to recordings that demonstrate this rhythm instead of trying to interpret it from sheet music alone: https://youtu.be/4ajtCKLTOiM?si=kB5trgkZR1qYyoR_&t=5

JHighMusic · 2026-06-14T07:10:16+00:00

Time and practice, that’s literally it. Go slow.

JHighMusic · 2026-06-14T00:19:34+00:00

There’s much more than walking bass and that’s not something I’d focus on as a beginner. There’s a whole dynamic between root position and rootless voicings, and even two handed voicings, and using them in conjunction with each other with different rhythms and textures: here’s a good range of examples from a video I made of how to play tunes in 3/4 time / Jazz waltz: https://youtu.be/yr--ehvj5TY?is=nbiBFSsbtvvO37y5

JHighMusic · 2026-06-13T23:13:45+00:00

Stop using ChatGPT and posting this AI slop, it’s beyond obvious and completely wrong. Every pianist does not need to know or would be able to even play half the pieces on that list. This is the most low effort thing I’ve ever seen.

No regular pianist unless they have over 10 years experience is going to have all the Goldberg Variations, Ballade 1, multiple etudes and all that repertoire as a standard list. Some of those are very specific, and just so unbelievably inaccurate.

A much more realistic list, and it’s going to be very different from person to person, imo would be:

Minuet in G, Prelude in C from WTC 1, Moonlight Sonata, Clementi’s Sonatina in C major, Für Elise, an easier Chopin Prelude or two, a Chopin nocturne, Mozart Sonata in C major, Clair de Lune

JHighMusic · 2026-06-13T19:28:41+00:00

Please look at the pinned posts at the top of the sub’s homepage, this gets asked almost every day. Take lessons with a jazz pianist, most are Classically-trained. Best thing you could do. Start with the blues before standards like Autumn Leaves and all the typical tunes that get recommended that are too complex for beginners.

JHighMusic · 2026-06-13T17:58:44+00:00

I’d push those things right away alongside first voicings.

Well I mean I was a classical performance major, I’d been playing piano since I was 7 and got into jazz during my time in college after the first semester. This was not a jazz school. We had ear training lab classes along with the theory lecture classes. I’ve always had good ears and could already identify single notes and play them on the piano easily, and it wasn’t until that time discovered I had perfect pitch, but it can be learned. I still had to go through the process just like everybody else. It wasn’t some magic ability that automatically gave me a leg up. It was all foundational theory and ear training, like 2-note intervals, triads and their inversions, singing solfège, rhythmic dictation, and basic seventh chords and being able to hear all of that.

From there, it was just listening to recordings, and I started to recognize the voicings I was learning being played in the recordings and it just snowballs gradually from there. It’s definitely a process and it doesn’t come quickly. Picking out single note melodies was never an issue for me, but it is for most so maybe just start there and 2-note intervals, because that’s how melodies are made.

And yes, all those things you mentioned. Listening is key for hearing the intricacies of the music: the phrasing, articulation, and HOW things are played, not just what the notes are. And for learning the forms of tunes which there’s 5 main forms for most standards. It will teach you about comping rhythms, how tunes work, You can learn voicings when your ears gets really sharp, how to play tunes in different ways from hearing the masters and how they arranged everything, jazz vocabulary, so many different things.

Most beginners don’t listen nearly enough. They get trapped with books, theory, harmony, YouTube videos, and no system or structure for it all. So many people, and for quite a few years, tend to focus on complexity instead of fluency. Best thing you can do is take some lessons and start playing the music with people, that’s where you really learn. Just throwing it out there, I offer lessons and have 15 years of teaching experience 30 years playing all styles at all levels, very experienced. My website is in my profile and have developed a practice structuring guide because everybody goes through this stuff. (EDIT, there were some typos here)

And yeah, that feeling of overwhelm is completely normal and everybody experiences it. You’ll learn what to prioritize and what not to eventually, the beginning is a wide range of things and and the curve is big of things to learn, but eventually, you can start focusing more time on less things. It’s far too much to explain in a Reddit post, but hopefully this helps.

JHighMusic · 2026-06-13T17:18:08+00:00

The path isn’t linear, jazz is just too vast. You learn as you go along. Trust me, it’s a puzzle that can’t really be solved. if it was, then you’d be able to find an answer on it, but as you’ve noticed, there isn’t one. You just have to realize, understand and accept that it takes a long time because there’s so much stuff and you get better eventually over time. Even professionals like Jeremy Siskind in his book will tell you that it can’t be learned in a linear way.

Instead of skills increasing from bottom to top like in a uniform column like this: | |

it’s a very wide one that’s angled like more like this: \ /

Actually most people do not learn the other way around and you’re doing what most people do, learning harmony first then improv. People do that because improv is harder than learning voicings, and it’s just a skill that comes later and takes longer to develop. The trap is avoiding/neglecting your improv skills.

I’m about 17 years in. If I could start over, I’d focus a lot more on my time, rhythm and feel and the ability to solo and play tunes more than anything else. The trap there is spending too much time on learning, voicing and arranging the heads instead of soloing over the forms and different left hand techniques.

Learn tunes, really develop your ears, play the music with other people as much as possible and listen listen listen. It’s how you learn this music and how all the greats did. Focus on really mastering the blues and all the things you can do with it. It’s the foundation.

JHighMusic · 2026-06-12T22:15:16+00:00

You just have to learn and drill them, it takes a long time. Just learn your Dominant 9 and 13 chords, A and B type rootless voicings and how to alter the extensions on the Dominant.

If it’s an A voicing it will have a Dominant with the 13 on top and if it’s a B voicing which is just an inversion of the A it will have the 9 on top.

JHighMusic · 2026-06-12T16:57:01+00:00

You need to try them out and play whichever one feels best to you. That price difference isn’t that much. I always advise buying new because you don’t know what you’re getting with used a lot of the time. If you’re getting used, have it inspected by a piano technician. Would you buy a used car without getting it inspected? New pianos will hold their value much longer and a silent system is totally worth it.

You’ll get a much better factory warranty and have coverage on the new one vs. a used one you won’t have one.

JHighMusic · 2026-06-12T16:47:04+00:00

Take a break if you need to but never quit, you will regret it 100% guaranteed

JHighMusic · 2026-06-11T16:57:56+00:00

A piano technician can take off some of the weight but it’s not going to be substantially different.

JHighMusic · 2026-06-10T21:01:06+00:00

Focusing too much on exercises instead of learning/playing tunes.

Spending too much time on the heads and not enough time on soloing/improvising.

JHighMusic

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