[furgooswft13]

I agree mostly. Guitar is often easier to learn for a lot of the music people want to play, pop songs with simple chord progressions. Once you get your fingers in place, strumming in rhythm is pretty natural to most people. Bar chords (and their bastard stepchild power chords) make this even easier.

Also the regular layout of the frets makes improvisation much easier as you just find the right starting point to whatever song you want to jam over, and start going up and down the same pentatonic scale pattern.

Of course all this only gets you so far, but it's enough for a lot of teenage rockstar wannabes to have fun. No harm in that at all.

By contrast most of the songs people seek to first play on the piano requires a much steeper hill to climb. Even Fur Elise can be very challenging to play at tempo for a beginner. Moonlight, while slow, still requires catching a lot of notes at once and reading a dense score with plenty of double sharps and what not (and God help you if you want to try the 3rd movement). Outside classical, it's much more difficult to get a good sound by just banging out chords, unlike strumming on a guitar. Some sort of separate melody and baseline is almost always expected on the piano.

Now if you want to rip out some mad Eddie Van Halen solos or perform classical finger-picking songs then all bets are off. In fact I'd say mastering multiple melodies at once (some sort of counterpoint) on guitar is much more difficult than piano.

And yes translating standard notation to guitar fingering is much more challenging, because it makes no sense for the guitar neck, and you have to know not just to hit say A3 but where on the neck it would be best to do that given your current position.

[TheOtherHobbes]

1st movement of Moonlight needs 5-7 years from a cold start to play well. You can learn to pick out the notes in less, but it's harder to play smoothly than it looks.

The 3rd movement of Moonlight is a Diploma level (i.e. university, 10 years of playing at a bare minimum) piece.

Guitar is popular because it's the opposite of piano. You can get somewhere recognisable within six months or so. But many players plateau after that. Really good guitar isn't any easier than really good piano.

[hashkb]

> on guitar is much more difficult than piano.

Yes of course! Classical guitar is on the level with all the other instruments. Those guitarists, of course, can all read music.

> some sort of counterpoint

Could you even write counterpoint in tab? Would it make sense? It'd be so much harder to read and write than just regular music at that point...

Edit:

> find the right starting point to whatever song you want to jam over, and start going up and down the same pentatonic scale pattern

This is very not true. It's only true for the simplest chord changes. And it's equally true and false for every other instrument. But... at the risk of being misunderstood again... guitarists are lazy and guitar affords many shortcuts.