If you’ve ever seen a piano, you will notice it’s a rather large instrument with usually 88 black and white keys. With so many keys, you think that remembering which keys are which notes would be a problem. Lucky for us, the piano keyboard is organized in a way that makes understanding where the notes are straightforward.
While there are 88 keys, we should remember that only twelve different notes repeat many times, so we only need to remember a small section of the piano keyboard. So, what is the pattern?
The piano is made of black and white keys, and we notice the black keys are organized in groups of two and three. The visible groups of two and three black keys make navigating the keyboard easy. For example, the first note to the left of a grouping of two black keys is a “C.” The “C” is found in that position throughout the keyboard, so whenever you see a group of two black keys, the first note to the left is a “C.”
This pattern of recognizing where the keys on the piano are continues throughout the keyboard. For example, the note between the two black keys in the group of two is a “D,” so the note between every group of two black keys is “D.” Not surprisingly, the note to the right of each group of two black keys is an “E.”
So now we know where to find the “C,” “D,” and “E” notes on the piano. We use the same method to recognize the notes around the group of three black keys we use for the group of two black keys. For example, the first key to the left of the three black keys is an “F.” So, the first note found to the left of each group of three black keys is an “F.”
Since the notes of the keyboard ascend in alphabetical order, the key to the right of “F” is “G.” Now, here is where things get interesting because, in our music alphabet, there are only seven letters, A-B-C-D-E-F-G, after which the notes reappear again. Because the series of notes starts to repeat, this means that the first note to the right of “G” on the piano keyboard is an “A” because the series of notes starts repeating from “A” again. If we follow this same logic, the first note directly to the right of the group of three black keys is a “B.”
So, we can see that the piano has 88 keys and 12 black-and-white notes that keep repeating. This makes the piano an easy instrument to locate notes on, with a little practice, of course.
