When you learn how to play the piano, it’s super important to know where all the notes are on the keyboard! Keep reading to learn how you can easily find all of the notes on the piano.
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Take a look at this piano with notes to help you find your way around the keyboard. Stick around to learn more about how to find notes on the piano, the musical alphabet, and why each black key has 2 names!
Take a look at the keyboard below. Notice the black keys are grouped in 2’s and 3’s:
The groups of 2 and 3 black notes will be your helpers to find ALL the piano notes. Think of them as your road signs.
Let’s call the group of 2 black piano notes the “twins” and the group of 3 black notes the “triplets.”
Once you know where the “twins” and “triplets” are, you can easily find 2 important notes - C and F. Think of C and F as anchor notes. The more familiar you become with C and F, the easier it is to know where all the notes on the keyboard are.
C will always be the white note directly to the left of the twins. F will be the white note directly to the left of the triplets.
Once you've found where C and F are, finding notes is as easy as A-B-C! This is because the notes to piano keys are the same as the first 7 letters of the English alphabet.
The only difference is the musical alphabet begins with C and ends with B. Once you reach B, the musical alphabet starts all over at C and repeats over and over again.
The musical alphabet tells us the names of the notes on the keyboard in order! Take a look at the keyboard below. Notice how the letter names match the musical alphabet.
As you can see, we begin with C directly to the left of the twin black keys. Each time we move one white key to the right, we go onto the next note of the musical alphabet! From C to D to E and so on. Also notice that once we reach B, the notes start over again at C and repeat!
Middle C is the C note that is closest to the middle of your keyboard! It is very helpful to know where middle C is - it’s a great place to start when learning how to play the piano.
When playing on a full sized 88 key piano or keyboard, middle C will be the 4th C counting up from the left. Middle C is also called C4 since it is the 4th C!
You might be asking yourself “how many piano keys are on a piano?” There are 88 keys on a full sized piano! Other smaller keyboards can have 61 or 72 keys. There are also even smaller keyboards that have even fewer keys!
The black keys on the piano are named a little bit differently than the white keys! The black keys are called sharps (#) and flats (b.) Take a look at the keyboard below:
Notice each black key has 2 names. This is because the black notes have different names in different musical keys! Sometimes a black note will be called a sharp (#) and sometimes a black note will be called a flat (b.) It really depends on what song you’re playing and what keys it’s in! Any note that has more than one name is called an Enharmonic Tone.
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