Posts tagged ‘sharps and flats’

The first thing you need to learn before playing the piano is the piano notes. What are they called? A standard piano keyboard has 88 keys on it including the black notes. The first notes to learn are the white notes, but how do go about memorizing the names of all those white notes.

Don’t panic, there are just seven white notes to learn and that’s it. Well not quite, there are indeed just seven white notes to learn, but you also have to identify were they occur on a keyboard. As for the black notes, they are sharps and flats of the white notes. So when you know what the white notes are called then you almost certainly will know what all the black notes are called as well.

As a beginner, you only need to learn the white notes and though your piano may have up to eighty-eight notes, there are just seven white notes to learn. Those notes are C, D, E, F, G, A and B, these notes are recurring throughout the keyboard. As a beginner, you will only make use of the first five notes and in one part of the keyboard, nevertheless this shouldn’t prevent you from learning each white note on the piano.

The next thing is to find where the notes are on the piano. To do this you can look for shapes on the piano keyboard that is to find sets of three black notes together and sets of two black notes together. To do this you need access to a piano keyboard, if you don’t have a piano or a keyboard then you should be able to find yourself a picture of a keyboard, there are lots available on the internet Now, lets find the first shape. You are looking for two black notes together, think of it a shape, you should see lots of sets of two black notes together. Now pick one instance of two black notes together, it doesn’t matter which two, and you will see that they are surrounded by three white notes. One white note to the left of the first black note, the next white note is between the two black notes and a white note to the right of the second black note. The first white note, that’s the one to the left of the first black note is called C, the second white note, the one in the middle is called D and the final note is called E.

Carrying on from the last note which is E, if we now move on to the very next white note to the right, this note is called F, then G, A and B. The last note played which is B is the first white note just after the last black note in the set of three. So to recap you should have played a white note before the set of two black notes, a white note just after the set of three black notes and all the white notes in between. This adds up to seven white notes. If you carry on up the keyboard, the process repeats itself using the same letters. You should now be able to find and name any white note on a piano keyboard.

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Key signatures are a theoretical approach to knowing what scales, chords and ideas you can play during a song without worrying about playing wrong notes. You can use the chords in a song to figure out what key it is in or if you are using regular notation you can simply look at how many sharps and flats or flats there are at the beginning of the clef. Key signatures can be major or minor and be any of the 12 notes of music, such as A minor or C major. Key signatures can give a certain feelings or moods to a song as well, much like major and minor chords.

Circle of Fifths

An easy way to figure out what key your playing in is to use the circle of fifths chart. At the beginning of a sheet of notation music there are a group of sharps or flats. The lines these symbols are on affects the notes on that line for the duration of the song or until the key changes again. To use the circle of fifths chart you can just count how many sharps or flats there are on the staff and compare it to the chart. If your music has 1 sharp, it is F major. Make sure if there are sharps, you use the right side of the chart, since the left side is for flats. If there are 3 flats, the key is Eb major. The numbers inside the circle correspond to the number of sharps (right side numbers) and the number of flats (left side numbers). There are a lot of different style of the circle of fifths charts so make sure you know what chart your looking at and know what everything means.

Keys and Chords

You can also tell what key you’re in by studying the chords you’re playing. When you’re playing just power chords using the root, 5th and 8th notes, you can judge by the root notes of the chords what key you’re in. For example, using the chords C5, D5, G5 you could be in the key of Gmaj OR Cmaj since both keys contain the notes C, D, and G. To really narrow down the key you’re in, you have to use chords that contain more notes. If you add in the 3rd to each chord it only leaves the key of Gmaj because the third of Dmaj is an F#, which doesn’t exist in the key of Cmaj. This shows why keys are important. If you’re playing these three chords, C, D, and G, you could maybe get away with playing a Cmaj scale for the melody by leaving out some notes, but it would be more to your advantage to use all the notes of the Gmaj scale.

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