The Most-Taught Instruments in Canada (2026 Data)

Which instruments do Canadians actually learn? One honest proxy is supply: what the country's music teachers are equipped to teach. Below is every instrument ranked by how many instructors in the Rockstar Music network offer it, a direct count across 183 teachers and 194 cities. A few results upend the usual assumptions.

The full ranking

Piano is the runaway leader, and theory and RCM exam preparation ranks second, a reminder that a large share of Canadian music study is aimed at graded exams. The surprises sit in the middle: ukulele above violin, and digital music production and songwriting ahead of every brass and woodwind instrument except saxophone. Follow any instrument to its lessons page to see the instructors who teach it.

The rare ones

At the far end of the tail are instruments with only a handful of instructors in the entire network. If you want to learn one of these, the bottleneck is finding a teacher at all.

What the ranking is, and is not

This measures instructor supply, the number of teachers equipped to teach each instrument, which is the most reliable signal we can report directly. It correlates closely with demand for the common instruments (teachers add the instruments families ask for), but for the rare instruments supply is the binding constraint: handpan and accordion are not unpopular so much as under-served. Read this as a map of where it is easy versus hard to find a teacher in Canada in 2026.