Piano Basics · Chapter 1 of 9
Meet the Keyboard
A piano looks like a long row of the same keys over and over. It is, and that’s good news: learn one small pattern and you can find your way along the whole keyboard.
Every key on a piano plays one note. Press it and a small felt hammer inside strikes a string. On a digital piano or keyboard, a recording or a computer makes the sound instead, but the keys work the same way.
Low on the left, high on the right
The keys on the left side sound low and deep, like a big voice. The keys on the right sound high and bright, like a bird. Each key sounds a little higher than the key to its left.
White keys and black keys
Look closely at the black keys. They are not spread out evenly. They come in groups: two black keys close together, then a gap, then three black keys, then a gap, then two again, then three, all the way along.
Between the groups there are two places where two white keys sit side by side with no black key between them. Those gaps are what make the groups easy to see.
This pattern of twos and threes is your map. Every note on the piano has its own spot in it, so once you know the pattern you never have to count keys from the end.
How many keys?
A full-size piano has 88 keys: 52 white and 36 black. Many keyboards are shorter, often 61 or 76 keys. The pattern of twos and threes is the same on all of them, so everything you learn here works on any piano or keyboard.
Playing the keys on this page. Click or tap a key. On a touch screen you can press several keys at once. On a computer, the letter keys A S D F G H J K play white keys and W E T Y U play black keys; press Computer keys to see which is which. If you have a MIDI keyboard, plug it in and press MIDI.
Remember
- Left is low, right is high.
- The black keys come in groups of two and three.
- That pattern repeats along the whole keyboard. It is your map.
Next, you’ll use the map to find the note C, and learn the names of all the white keys.