With 88 keys, a full-size piano keyboard might look intimidating, but it’s really just the same group of 12 notes – or octave – repeated seven times, with a few extra thrown in at the top.

The first time I sat down to try to play a piano, I was five months past my 40th birthday. It was a five-octave Yamaha beginner keyboard with a Bossa Nova setting and basically no dynamics, and I had ...