How To Read Piano Keys

Hello, my name's Matthew Forbes from The Music Workshop Company. I'm going to take you through how to tune some instruments, how to play them basically, and also how to read the notated music form. The notes on the piano are such, the middle C is literally the middle note of the piano here.

I'm just going to deal with the white notes, the white keys for the moment. They go in alphabetical order, as it were: C, D, E, F, G, A, B, and then we get to C again. The reason we get to C again is because of this sound.

It's called the octave. It's the purest interval in music, and that means those two notes are the same letter name. On the piano anyway, you will see them separated by a white note to the left and the first of two black notes there.

All of my C's. If I were to pick another note at random, say the F, again that's the white note just before the first of the three black notes in the sequence. So again, they're in alphabetical order: C, D, E, F, G, A, B, and C.

The black notes are the sharps and the flats. The sharps written, which I will explain in a moment, is where the composer wants to put the note a semitone above the white note from where it goes. So that will be a C sharp.

This will be a D sharp. This will be a G and a G sharp. And it's the same for both hands.

It's explained on the page slightly differently, but it's always the same across the piano. The black notes are the sharps and the flats, where the composer wants to use the note between the two white notes, as it were. If he wants to go higher, it's a sharp, so C sharp or a G sharp.

If he wants to go lower from the note, say A, he actually writes an A flat, or an E flat. In piano notes, just be very careful as the interval, or the gap, between two notes is always what we call a whole tone, between the C and the D, the D and the E, and so on. And it's bisected by a black note, apart from between an E and an F and a B and a C.

So they don't have a black note between them because they're only semitones between the E and the F and the B and the C. They are the exceptions. So those are the notes on the piano. .