Piano keys and note names

Two kinds of keys, one pattern

A full piano has 88 keys: 52 white and 36 black. Digital keyboards are often shorter, with 61, 49 or even 25 keys, but they all follow the same layout. Look only at the black keys for a moment. They are not spread evenly: they come in groups of two and groups of three, separated by a gap where two white keys sit side by side with no black key between them.

That alternation, two then three, is the whole map of the instrument. It repeats from the bottom of the keyboard to the top, and everything else in this lesson hangs on it. When you sit at a new piano, you never count keys from the end. You glance at the black keys, and you know where you are.

Seven letters, over and over

The white keys are named with the first seven letters of the alphabet: A, B, C, D, E, F and G. After G the alphabet starts again at A, so the names repeat in the same order all the way up. Going to the right the letters climb (C, D, E...), going to the left they fall back (C, B, A...). There is no H on a piano in English: the musical alphabet stops at G.

Most lessons, songs and method books start counting from C, not from A, because the scale of C major uses only the white keys. That is why the figure below begins on C.

Finding any note from a landmark

Every white key touches the black-key pattern in a way you can describe, so you can find it without reading a label. Start from the groups:

• C is the white key just left of a group of two black keys.
• D sits between the two black keys of that group.
• E is just right of the group of two.
• F is just left of a group of three black keys.
• G and A sit inside the group of three, in that order.
• B is just right of the group of three, and the next key is C again.

Two pairs of neighbours, E and F, then B and C, have no black key between them. Keep those two gaps in mind: they explain a lot of music theory later, from half steps to the shape of the major scale. For now, they are simply the places where the pattern of black keys breaks.

Octaves: the same note, higher or lower

From one C to the next C on the right there are twelve keys, seven white and five black. That distance is called an octave. Two notes an octave apart share a name because they sound alike: play a low C and a high C one after the other and you hear the same note, only higher. To tell them apart, musicians add a number. The C near the middle of the piano is C4, the next one up is C5, the one below is C3. The next lesson is about that middle C and where your hands rest around it.

You do not need the numbers yet. In the exercise, any octave counts: if the page asks for D, every D on the keyboard is a right answer.

Practise: find the note

The piano below has its names switched off on purpose. Press Start, read the letter, find the black-key group that leads to it, and play. You can use the mouse, a finger on a touch screen, or your computer keyboard: the middle row of letter keys plays the white keys and the row above plays the black ones. Switch Labels to Keys to see which key is which. As you play, each note is written on the staff, which is where the reading lessons begin.

Say each name out loud as you press the key. It feels silly for a minute and then it sticks: the pianists who read fastest are the ones who never stopped naming notes in their head. When you can play ten notes without a wrong key, move on to middle C.