I think the truth of that statement very much depends on the genre, workflow, and age of the composer.

Yes, some older composers cut their teeth with pianos, staff-paper and pencils and established workflows based strictly on getting the whole song on paper before the orchestration/arrangement, and still work that way today.

However, I'd argue the vast majority of younger composers and people who write in more electronic-influenced genres definitely do not follow that workflow. It'd be very hard to write an entire pop/rap/dance track that relies heavily on the drum and bass interplay by first writing it all out on piano.

Practically every single DAW setup has a piano keyboard sitting in front of it. As a guitarist, I have had to learn to be at least competent on keys to communicate with people using DAWs. That's a pretty strong counterargument.

I think the only real argument would be whether most people compose with piano or guitar--and piano outnumbers guitar by a lot last I checked.

Everything else is in the noise.

Me too. My brother in law would sit writing music on manuscript for hours. Very occasionally he would get up, go plink plonk .. mm .. plunk on a piano, and sit down to carry on writing.

I'm just going to concur with GP: as someone who has looked for advice for songwriting on guitar, the writers I look up to almost always wrote with a piano. If your quibble is with "most", and your musical tastes are somewhere within EDM (mine are not), might be a perception bias towards laptop electronica.

i don’t know the breakdown but a lot of musicians in general do this, even some producers. For my genres more often with an acoustic guitar and vocalist (usually same person) ; interestingly at least one does this when the final song(s) don’t even include a guitar. I have very limited exposure to this but it makes sense.

https://woodandsteel.taylorguitars.com/issue/2021-issue-1/fe...

To put it another way, do you think that the harmonies and flourishes are written before the chord progression and the melodies?