Basic Piano Tutorial

Basic Piano Notes :

This section contains the basic overview
of the piano notes. The illustration below is a replica of the layout of th e
piano notes.Each note has been marked with its name.You must have already
noticed that there are a set of white and black keys, white keys placed
beneath the black ones. There is also a particular pattern in which these
keys are placed. All of these will be illustrated in detail below.

There are all total 12 notes in a piano,
each identified by its unique name. Start looking at the picture from the
extreme left. The first white key is marked as C. The note that immediately
follows is a black key, marked as C#. Subsequent keys that follow are
D,D#,E,F,F#,G,G#,A,B and C again.The same pattern of keys are repeated
afterwards.

Notice that after G# there is no H
note...the next note in sequence is A, followed by B and then C again.

It is very important to remember the keys
corresponding to the notes, this stands as a basic requirement before
proceeding any further with this tutorial.

How To
Remember The Notes :

This section illustrates the pattern in the
key layout of the Piano. You will find it extremely helpful as a way to
remember the keys corresponding to the notes.

As described already there are 12 notes in
a piano : C,C#,D,D#,E,F,F#,G,G#,A, and B. If you start looking at one
particular section of the Piano which starts with C and then following the
notes C#, D.... upto B, you will notice that this section contains a
collection of 7 white keys and 5 black keys.The white keys are laid down one
after another, whereas the black keys have a layout of 2:3 i.e there are 2
black keys one after another, then after a gap there are 3 black keys one
after another.Now in order to identify the C note, you just have to look for
the area with 2 black keys ( one after another ), the white key immediately
previous to the first black key ( from left to right ) will be the C
note.Once you have identified the C note, you can very well identify the
others.

2 Black
Keys

3 Black
Keys

7
White Keys

Note C is immediately before the
two black keys

There will be more than such regions in
your keyboard/piano, starting from
note C to B. Each of these are called octaves. Figure below shows
these regions.

Octave-1

Octave-2

Octave-3

Octave-2 is at a higher pitch than
Octave-1.Similarly Octave-3 is at a higher pitch than Octave-2, and so on. In
terms of physics, the note C in Octave-2 has exactly double frequency than
the note C in Octave-1.However you need not worry about the physics here,
just try and get aquianted yourself with the notes and thier corresponding
keys. Gradually you will find no difficulty in recognizing the keys.To
re-iterate, this forms the base of Piano lessons, so build up a strong base
for yourself before plunging into more complex lessons.

Sharp Notes :

The notes marked with the # sign signify
the sharp notes e.g C# is pronounced as C sharp, D# is pronounced as D sharp
etc.The black keys are the sharp keys. The notes C,D,F,G and A have their
corresponding sharp keys, which are essentially the black keys, just after
the correponding white keys for C,D,F,G and A.Have a look at the illustration
below.

The black key immediately following C note
is the C sharp note.Similarly the black note immediately following D note is
the D sharp note.There is no E# or B# note, as you can already see, as there
is no black key following E or B keys.

Flat Notes :

The
key immediately previous to a key in question is its corresposnding flat
note. As for example the note immediately previous to note C is called C flat
( presented as Cb in notations ). However as you might figure out by looking
at the piano layout in the above illustration, the immediate previous key to
C is B.Basically we are referring to the same note here, but with different
names.