The best gifts for piano students

The gift-buyer’s advantage with a piano student

With most hobbies, buying a gift means guessing at taste. With a piano student it means noticing a gap, and the gaps are consistent, visible from across a room and cheap to close. Almost every student under about three years in is missing at least two of the items on this page, and nobody has bought them because they are not the interesting part of the purchase.

The guides are ordered by how much difference each one makes, not by price. The first three change how the student plays. The next two change how they practise. The last two are the only ones where you have to know something about their lessons first, and the page says exactly what to check.

1. An adjustable bench, if they are sitting on a dining chair

This is the gift to buy if you only buy one, and the gap is visible from the doorway: a student perched on a kitchen chair or an office chair is sitting at the wrong height. Too high and the wrists drop, which is a technique problem a teacher then spends months undoing. Too low and the forearms angle up. A bench whose height adjusts also follows a growing child for years rather than being outgrown.

The correct height is a measurement rather than a preference — our bench height page has it, and it is worth reading before you buy so the gift arrives with the instruction that makes it useful.

2. A real sustain pedal, if theirs is a plastic footswitch

Look under the keyboard. If the pedal is a flat lightweight plastic box with a cable, it slides across the floor under a foot pressing on a sloped surface, and the student spends the piece chasing it. A piano-shaped pedal that stays put costs very little and is the single cheapest thing that makes playing feel like playing.

Buy one with a polarity switch, which is the detail that stops this being a risky gift: manufacturers do not agree on pedal polarity, so a pedal hard-wired for one brand can behave backwards on another. A switch means it works with whatever they own and whatever they own next. Our sustain pedal guide explains the rest, including the one case where a student genuinely does not need a pedal yet.

3. Wired headphones, if they share a house

Headphone practice is the structural advantage a digital piano has over an acoustic one, and a surprising number of students never get to use it because nobody bought the headphones. A student who can play at nine at night practises more, and more practice beats a better instrument every time.

One hard requirement: wired. Bluetooth headphones introduce a delay between pressing a key and hearing the note, which makes a digital piano genuinely unplayable, and it is the most common way this gift goes wrong. Both pairs below are wired. Our headphones for digital piano page compares them in full — the Audio-Technica is the default, the Sony is the one with replaceable parts that outlives the instrument.

4. A metronome, which is a better gift than it sounds

Students practise too fast. All of them, without exception, and the symptom is a passage that falls apart in the same place every time. A metronome fixes it, and a dedicated one beats a phone app for a reason that has nothing to do with sound quality: there are no notifications on it. For a young child a mechanical wind-up metronome is more fun and more likely to be used; for everyone else the small digital unit below is the student default. Our metronome roundup has both, and how to use a metronome is worth printing and putting in the box, because the device without the method is just a clicking noise.

5. A music stand, if they are reading off the keyboard lid

Many digital pianos ship with a small music rest that holds a thin book badly and a thick one not at all, and students end up reading from a book propped on the instrument or flat on a chair. Both teach a neck and posture problem. A folding stand goes to lessons; a heavy symphony stand outlives the student. Our music stands page compares them, and it is the cheapest item on this list that solves a daily irritation.

What not to buy

• Bluetooth headphones. Covered above, and worth repeating because they are the most likely mistake on this page.
• A second keyboard. A well-meant upgrade is a hard gift to get right, because the student’s next instrument depends on what their teacher is asking for. If the intention is genuinely an instrument, our step-up guide sets out the four signals that an upgrade is actually warranted — and the cheaper fixes that usually come first.
• Novelty sheet music for a level they have not reached. A beautiful book of pieces a student cannot yet play is a reminder of the gap rather than a gift. Ask the teacher what level they are at and buy one notch below it, not above.

For gifts across other instruments and other budgets, our music gifts under $50 and music gifts for kids re-frame the same registry of picks for different recipients, and the Black Friday hub records what actually discounted last year with sources rather than predicting what might.