If you're thinking about giving the gift of music this holiday season, Carpenter's Music World on Kietzke Lane has plenty of ways to get started. They carry a line of digital keyboards that are engineered to sound like much pricier models.
"Now they have what they call digital sampling," said Wendell Carpenter. "It's where the sound is actually taken off the instrument itself, locked into a chip, and when the student plays that, it plays the original sound of the instrument. So the $275,000 Bosendorfer really is that sound coming out of the chip, through the speaker system in the product."
Carpenter has been selling pianos for more than half a century. He says pianos, on average, stay in a home for 57 years.
"It's much more likely a child will be interested in a piano if a piano is in the home," he said. "My theory is a piano is what makes a house a home."
Digital keyboards never have to be tuned.
"My saying is they come with lifetime free tunings, no strings attached!" Carpenter said.
Another option - these keyboards can be plugged into headphones.
"That not only creates an island for an individual, but the sound is more realistic through the headphones than the speakers," Carpenter said. "So it's a way to be able to have their own private piano in the middle of the living room, maybe with everyone else enjoying a football game."
He says it's really never too early to start.
"A lot of children just naturally want to play the piano," Carpenter said. "Piano keys are fascinating to them. My daughter started playing when she was three years old and she just loved to play the piano, to hear the sound of it."
Music, he says, can also help in other aspects of life.
"It's so beneficial because it creates life skills," Carpenter said. "They learn study habits, the discipline to practice every day, which is very necessary. They learn to plan and create and to set goals and have dreams and as they do this, they develop life skills that will help them in all of their studies and other activities."
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