So, why is it called weighted hammer action? On a real piano, the keys are connected to a hammer mechanism. When you press a key, a hammer is launched which strikes the string, setting it into vibration. When the vibration of the string is transmitted to the piano’s body, you hear a loud sound.

The hammers gradually reduce in size as you move in the higher register of the piano. Thus, the keys in the lower register gives you more resistance, while the keys of the higher register are reponsive to lighter touches as well.

A digital piano (or equivalently, a keyboard with weighted hammer action), simulates this feel of the piano. Such keyboards have actual hammer-like mechanism under the key that gives you this feel. This almost feels like a real piano.

Apart from this, such digital pianos also have a very superior, multiple dynamic levels sampling of an actual piano’s sound. Thus, compared to a normal keyboard, they sound more piano like. They have that rich, vibrant and resonating sounds.

An example of a good digital piano is the Yamaha P155. It has a better Graded Hammer (GH) standard. The Yamaha P95s use an inferior GHS action.

Casio’s equivalent would be the Casio Privia PX830. The lower end Privias like the PX130 and PX330 have quite a plastiky feel to them. For almost the price of the PX830, you can get a Yamaha P155, which is an excellent digital piano choice.

If you wanted to go higher, then it’d only be the Yamaha Clavinovas. But they’re very professional digital pianos, and if you just want something for home, the P155 should probably suffice. However, it’s worth checking all of them out.

A keyboard:

1. Has a soft touch keyboard. This means that the keys don’t require you to apply a lot of force.
2. Are velocity sensitive. The faster your press the keys, the louder the sound. This is how you control dynamics.
3. Has a lot of instrument voices, including the piano. However, the piano sound is not very authentic when compared to the real one. But it’s excellent for popular music likes blues, jazz and rock.
4. Normally has 61 keys.

A piano, on the other hand:

1. Has a weighted hammer action keyboard. The keys are harder to press in the bass area, and the resistance decreases as you move up. This is because we have hammers in a real piano. A digital piano also has a similar mechanism under the keys to give the same feel as a real piano.
2. The sound is as close as you can get to the real piano. The sound of a piano is sampled at different volume levels. Depending on how fast you press, the appropriate sample is used. All the samples are linearly morphed to give a wide dynamic range.
3. They normally have less instrument voices. But they almost always include the strings and bass. You won’t need other voices, since they sound quite terrible anyway.
4. Normally has 88 keys.

If you ever want to learn a piano in the future, then you should probably get a digital piano (like the Yamaha P155, which seems to have a nice offer going on in Amazon). This will allow you to develop a proper technique for piano playing. You need not upgrade to an acoustic piano in the future either, you could just get a higher end digital piano. Digital pianos are good when you have space problems, and don’t want to deal with the maintenance that an acoustic piano requires.

If you’re just looking for a keyboard, you could buy something like the Yamaha DGX-230. As opposed to 61 keys, it has 76 keys. However, it still qualifies as a keyboard. From what I’ve researched, it seems to be a very good keyboard.

I’m normally not so inclined towards Casio pianos because I’ve seen a lot of negative reviews online regarding their build quality. The keys seem to be plasticky, make a lot of noise, and their hammer mechanism wears off soon. I read about this when I was researching their Privia series. It seems to me that the Privia series is not the only one plaguaed with this problem.

However, that doesn’t mean all Casio keyboards are bad. But you might want to check out reviews on Amazon and other sites like Piano World before you commit to something. The Yamaha P155 that I mentioned is considered to be a very good digital piano for the price. Excellent build quality and sound (uses 4 levels of dynamic sampling, even better than the lower end Clavinovas).

I was hosted with a company called SharkSpace, which was taken over by Eleven2. I paid a visit to the new customer center at Eleven2, wherein I found out about this cool offer. I jumped on it.

So, right now, I have two accounts with them. One is my old SharkSpace one, and this is the new one I just bought. I’ll get started with it once my domain’s DNS propagates.

You might already have a hosting. However, if you’re an internet or an affiliate marketer, you’d most probably have more than one hosting account. It helps keep the clutter down. And for $11.11, there’s nothing to lose.

Once again, click here to check out the offer.

JamPlay is a subscription based popular guitar lessons site with over 2,000 lessons in HD and about 43 instructors, for practically all styles and levels of playing. Be it speed playing, reading music, starting guitar from scratch, playing the blues or rock, or anything for that matter, you WILL find it here.

SongPond is a collection of video lectures for learning your favorite songs and putting all the guitar technique that you’ve learned into action. Want to impress your friends with songs familiar to them? This is it.

Songsterr is a great companion to SongPond. You’ll have the digital sheet music with automatic scrolling and ability to print them. It’s a great way to learn to read TAB aswell. You can check how a certain piece of TAB in a song has to be played.

Song Surgeon can change tempo and pitch of any song in your collection without much distortion. This is extremely useful if you are transcribing songs by ear. Transcribing songs by ear will not only make you a better guitarist, but also an overall better musician. This approach of figuring out songs by your own has been suggested by many guitarits online.

Singing Success gives you access to the Singing Success TV.

The subscription periods that you get are 4-months for JamPlay, SongPond and Songsterr, and 3-months for SingingSuccess. You get the standard version of Song Surgeon. In short, an amazing 83% off deal. You only pay $89. Click here to check out the deal.

You don’t want a reference so extensive that you can only use it as a reference, not a tool for learning from the beginning. At the same time, you want it to be systematic, tutorial like and complete.

Enter ‘The Java Tutorials’ on Java’s Official Website

If you haven’t visited it already, you can find it here.

I recommend taking a look at the Learning Paths to figure out in which order you should read the tutorials.

Download the tutorials for offline use

You can also download the entire tutorial set for offline use. Here’s the link to download it, which you can also find in the tutorial index above. It’s just a bit hard to see.

The tutorial download is available as a zip file which is around 103MB in size.

They are all useful. However, they don’t completely displace the simplest of them all, pen (or pencil) and paper.

Rough work and scribbling

Pen and paper are only limited by your artistic skills and imagination. You can write whatever you want, however you want. You can even draw stuff.

There is no need to add a “new feature” to enable you to draw something new with your pen.

You may have the best wireframing tool to design web pages. But the same thing can be roughly done using a pen and a paper. Here, you’re just scribbling ideas. It’s your rough work.

If there is something wrong with your rough work, you can start afresh on a new page immediately.

Use specialized apps for fair work

This is where your ideas are a bit more formalized. This is where you stick up your design in your favorite wireframing app (if you use one at all), entering precise measurements.

Since it resembles your final work closely, you’ll be able to make fine adjustments here.

Pen and Paper are portable

No one stops you from scribbling. It doesn’t need charging. And it’s not bound by the latest development in input technologies.

You can carry it around easily too!

So, what workflow does that leave us with?

Here it is:

1. Use pen and paper to scribble ideas as they come to your mind. If you have a logo, you can immediately draw a rough sketch without messing with some app. This is where you jot down the big picture.
2. Use specialized apps to put your preliminary work into a more formal format. This is where you present your work as a proof-of-concept, making all the fine adjustments you need.
3. Go on to create the real thing using your previous works as a basis.

Some interesting thing to note about this plugin is that:

• It can capture either the visible region, the entire web page or just a selection.
• It can capture Java and Flash embedded in the web page.

So, play around with it!

First, a little bit about me

I’ve been playing guitar for about 2.4 years. I’m starting out on violin. I owned a mini keyboard since I was a kid, and have had a crack at it too. However, I’ve not taken any formal lessons on the keyboard, but I am planning on doing so, and I have indeed read method books on keyboard/piano techniques.

A fact you will hear about all the three instruments

“It will take you a few months/years to learn, but a lifetime to master…”

That’s not just true for any instrument there is, but also for games like Chess. So, it’s nothing new.

If all the instruments take so long to master, then how can one of them be tougher than the other? Or is it just an illusion?

The answer lies in “instant gratification”

Instant gratification? What’s that? To explain, let’s start with the simplest looking instrument amongst the three. The keyboard.

The reason I chose the keyboard is because you can give it to a child, and the child can start playing meaningful tunes within an evening.

The child most problably will have a lot of problems getting a nice note to sound on the guitar. So, playing a series of notes (the melody) in a nice legato fashion is out of question. Chords are out of the equation, at least for the evening.

Now, what about the violin? The child might not even master holding the bow in an evening. Even I won’t be able to, as a matter of fact. It takes practice and time to get a hang of it – to get it naturally. We haven’t even gone to the hard part of putting the violin in proper playing position, and playing at least a single meaningful note.

So, is violin the hardest? No!!!

When the child plays a simple (or even complex) melody on a keyboard easily, he isn’t using all of the techniques properly. There is a very specific way in which you have to keep your hands and fingers, and the child might not be doing that.

And, you have to play with both of your hands, if you ever want to reach the true potential of the instrument. The left hand gives the underlying base or rhythm, and the right hand gives the melody or again a rhythm. In short, the left hand plays in the bass clef while the right hand plays in the treble clef.

It’s difficult to get the co-ordination right. It’s difficult reading two lines of music and playing them correctly, in tempo and smoothly.

Not just that. In a piano or higher end keyboards, you add dynamics (volume of your notes) by choosing whether to press the keys harder or softer. You have to have good finger independence to make sure you don’t accidently press any key, for it will sound horrible.

And of course, you should be able to play the chords comfortably. It’s all simple if you follow the right technique, but it’s not easy. Remember, by saying simple, I mean simple as in to understand. By saying it’s not easy, I’m implying that it does take work (as in no easy money).

And there are loads of other things which even I have not begun to explore…

And what about the guitar?

Sore hands and fingers. The picking hand not striking the right string. You’re not able to get a smooth melody line, for it all sounds very detached. You have to keep looking at both your left and right hand to make sure that they’re at the right position. All these are the problems faced by a beginning guitarist.

Chords, and thus chord changes are even more difficult. Strumming a chord properly (the right hand technique) is also tricky. The up-strum is what takes some time to get a knack of.

And don’t get me started on the ‘Dreaded F Chord.’ It takes a while to get hang of. Some people get it right at first. I had no problems with the full barre F chord, but a lot of problems with the 4-string ‘mini’ version.

And there are a lot of strumming techniques like muting, dead strokes, accents and chord variants that are needed to give a really great, full-sounding rhythm. Even I’m not yet capable of that, and it might take some time to get there.

Many argue that there are a lot more guitarists that violinsts, which should imply that violin is more difficult than guitar. But they don’t realize that the majority of hobbyist guitarists would never have enough skill to become a session guitarist, for most of them can’t even sight read.

Finally, the violin

The violin requires a lot of learning even before you play a single note. This comes in the form of holding the bow properly, holding the violin properly, and having a good posture. After all that, you get to make your first bow stroke, that too only in the middle portion of the bow. You have no begun fretting any notes so far either.

After good amount of practice, you will get a hang of it, and will become better.

The one difficult thing in violin that everyone claims is vibrato. Violin allows one thing that the other two instruments don’t, that is sustaining a note. However, if you sustain a note without a vibrato, it sounds pretty horrible. With vibrato, the sustain feels natural. A person not so inclined towards music might not even “hear the vibrato” as such, but will find the sound pleasing.

So, is vibrato that difficult? Yes. But not just in violin. A good vibrato technique is quite difficult to master even on a guitar. Great guitarists have their own signature vibrato techniques. It might take you a year to get a good vibrato with all of your fingers, both on a guitar and a violin.

The only difference with violin is that vibrato crops up much more early. Since sustained notes is the primary feature of violin, you need to master vibrato in order to use it. With guitar, you can play a lot of great music without knowing about vibrato. But you can add a lot of color to the music once you learn it.

In the end… what’s the verdict?

All the three instruments pose specific challenges. Some crop up early on, while some occur later. But it takes a lifetime of effort to master any of them.

All the instruments have some special features that differentiates it from the others. To use those special features, you need to develop special techniques unique to that instrument. That’s the reason you can’t compare the skills required to play two different instruments, for they’re different all together.

Which instrument to learn, then?

Listen to music from each of the instrument. Which one of it do you like? If you’re a huge Eric Clapton fan, then you might go with the guitar. For more classically oriented people, violin might be a great choice. Keyboard/Piano works for both types of music.

Your job is to find out which instrument will help you play the songs/music you like the most, and then learn that instrument! There is nothing wrong is learning multiple instruments.

You may occasionally write posts which might be purely promotional. If something is working for you, don’t discontinue it. Combine it with PowerBlogging.

PowerBlogging will only add to the power of your blog. Whatever I’ve taught you helps you add more quality content to your blog. And this in turn increases the amount of quality traffic you get.

Once you start getting quality traffic, you’ll start answering your own “monetization” questions. That’s because opportunities would arise from all directions.

Once you have a high traffic blog, it’s easier to judge the opportunities to monetize it. If you’re just getting a small amount of traffic, and you try to guess how you’ll monetize a high traffic blog, you’ll surely overlook many things.

Maybe you will run into “blogging” joint ventures. Who knows?

But remember one thing, keep an open mind. See how other things you’ve learned about blogging fits into PowerBlogging. Make your own cocktail out of it. Be different, try different stuff. And then you’ll surely be successful

I did not plan on including this section initially. Not because it’s irrelevant or bad. On the contrary, it’s the greatest powerful technique you will possess once you master it. The main problem lies in mastering it.

It’s not difficult. It just requires you to be open-minded, and do things you’ve been advised against all along. Moreover, it’s not a very concrete tactic that everyone will be able to apply instantly.

The gist of the tactic is to open up your mind, do new things everyday. Observe everything you see and experience carefully. Think creatively on how it relates to you, or your current endeavors. And then blog about it.

The greatest example of this is Seth Godin’s own blog. And no wonder why he’s such a great person. You will find endless supply of such examples on his blog, because that’s what he does.

Never confine your attention to just one thing. Vary it.

I’ll throw in my own impromptu example I came up with. Let’s say you were drinking water from a container made of glass, and it accidentally fell down and shattered into pieces.

Everyone around you looks at you, your reaction. What has happened is, you’ve drawn attention. You might be a stranger to all of them, but you’re one such stranger at whom they have stared longer than other strangers.

So, let’s say you try striking up a conversation with someone. And you find that it was easier than you thought, since you’re “familiar” to them due to the “glass incident”. Maybe, conversation may start with that very incident.

Blog about this, and write your experience. Write about how small “accidents” can catch attention, build credibility, and even ease your life.

And don’t be surprised if you form a “fan base”.