Personally I haven't been forced to make the decision between buying a normal upright piano and a digital piano as I have both in my home. I can see advantages in both types of pianos when practicing the art of learning to play piano.

A normal upright piano produces sounds with hammers that strikes the strings. A digital piano on the other hand tries to duplicate the feeling of playing an acoustic piano.

Most people are familiar with the normal upright piano but what advantages has a digital piano?

First let us describe a digital piano.

A digital piano consists of a keyboard with weighted key action, sensors that detect the velocity when you play the keys and a set of sounds you can choose from. To make it possible to listen to the piano when you play you have an amplifier and loudspeakers and headphone jacks.

Here are some advantages with a digital piano:

1. A digital piano doesn't need to be tuned. A normal acoustic piano you should tune once or twice a year. If you can't tune a piano yourself you have to turn to a piano tuner. It can be quite expensive of course. Even a piano tuner has to pay his bills.

2. You can practice silently. A digital piano usually has a headphone jack so by using headphones you can practise as much as you want without disturbing neighbours or family members.

3. Midi interface. A digital piano usually has a midi interface which makes it possible to connect your piano to a computer and use music software like notation programs or a sequenser program or a software synthesizer.

What then are the disadvantages of having a digital piano?

1. The sounds in an acoustic piano are produced by strings vibrating and the different pitches interact in ways that you cannot copy on a digital piano. The sound quality of the sounds produced by digital pianos are becoming better and better but it is still a completely different way of producing sounds.

2. A digital piano is limited when it comes to producing different tone colors by different ways of playing. An accomplished pianist might feel limited by the sampled sounds.

There are many more things to say about choosing a piano but this is a beginning.

As you can see it is not so easy to decide what's best for you. If you can't decide what type of piano to buy you can do as I have done. Have both types of pianos and keep smiling.