Evenin' All,
My name is Peter. I'm 75 and threequarters - certainly not the youngest of you but not I suspect the oldest. Since retirement in 1988 I've lived half way up a mountain in Snowdonia National Park in North Wales UK and when I sit at the keyboard it can truly be said the hills are alive....
I had 3months of piano lessons interrupted by the war and not resumed until around age 40 when I had the urge to play again. From the pre-war lessons I was able to relate written notes to the keyboard and on a friend's advice bought Hanon's Virtuoso Excercises. Never achieved Virtuoso standard but enought to give independent finger movement and play scales and arpeggios. For about 10 years I enjoyed making music mixing classics with arrangements by people like Andre Previn, Shearing, Peterson but increasingly frustrated that I could never reach their standard. Could manage Chopin's Minute Waltz quite accurately but it took me nearly 4 minutes. In the late 70's while in a Departmental Store heard an organ and was hooked on the sound and accompaniments so the piano was replaced by a Yamaha C55. Technically found this much easier to play - chords only with left hand and melody on upper manual, but initially faced a problem. Having only played from written scores I had no idea what chords were and as most music from organs came in busker form I had to learn chords - at all chord changes, look up the appropriate group of notes to play left hand. It was a long slow process but after a few months the left hand automatically formed the right shape. Although the number of styles on the Yamaha was limited, no means of adding more, I learned that by pressing two or more of the manual rhythm buttons together you could mix and make some quite interesting rhythms... Also, the manual bass pedals could be used to over ride the auto bass which helped variety. The Yamaha also had a built in rotating Leslie type speaker which was very impressive. I later found that the Hammond people stopped Yamaha from using this speaker in subsequent models and the electronic tremolo/chorale was pretty pathetic, as it was in most organs of that era until the sampled versions became available.
The Yamaha was replaced by an Elka which had nice sounds but very unreliable, kept breaking down. Then, coming up to retirement I bought me a present of a Yamaha HS8, quite something. Problem was that the promise that Yamaha made that " you need never buy another organ" didn't quite come true. The additional sounds and styles were very limited, and expensive, and the styles turned out to be just drum patterns.
After a few years I heard about expanders and bought me a Technics SMAC1200 and midi'd this to the HS8. This little box was a revelation, no need to say more. As I never seemed to use the HS8 sounds or styles, this organ went and was replaced by a Korg i3 and together with the SMAC, music life was pretty good. Came the Technics KN3000 and life got even better. Eventually changed this for a very disappointing Yamaha PSR8000, sounds OK but styles very bland and addition style cards no better so this was quickly replaced by the KN6000 and now the 7000.
Was going to add to the "by ear" debate but have been called away and if you can bear it will come back later.

Peter