How to Play the Piano (or Keyboard) Like a Pro: Lesson 1- It's all About "Reading" Notes

Note are the building blocks of music in the same way words are the building blocks of English. So the first thing you have to do is learn how to read notes. (Some of you may already be able to read notes, if so, you may want to skip this section.) Let's begin by looking at a piano keynoard; a section of it is shown below.

The best place to start is with what is called middle C. As its name implies, it's right in the middle of  the piano. You can easily find it by looking for the set of black notes closest to the center; it is the white note to the left of the left one (see diagram). And as the diagram shows, the white notes to the right of middle C follow the alphabet up to G, then they start over again.

They are related to the notes of written music in the following way. Written music usually has two staffs -- one for the right hand and one for the left. The good news for you is that you can completely ignore the one for the left hand. The one for the right hand is called the treble staff and it consists of five lines as shown above.

Middle C is just below the lowest line. And as it turns out, both lines and spaces are important (their designation is shown in the diagram). Looking back at the diagram of the keyboard, we see the correspondence. In practise it is convenient to consider the lines and spaces separately. The lines are E G B D F, and everyone who has ever taken piano lessons remembers the old saying that is used to memorize them, namely, "Every good boy deserves fun." In the same way, the spaces are FACE and I'm sure you won't need a saying to remember them.

So much for the white notes; let's turn now to the black notes. They give us what are called sharps and flats. The black note to the right of middle C, for example, is C sharp and we designate it as C# . Similarly, the black note to the right of any white note is the sharp of that note. In the same way, flats are the black notes to the left of white notes. For example, E-flat is the black note to the left of E.
It's immediately obvious from this that a given black note can have two different designations. Consider middle C again; the black note to the right of it is C- sharp, but it is also D-flat. Fortunately, this doesn't cause any problems, and it's always clear what note we're referring to.

Sometimes the sharp or flat symbol appears right next to the note, and this tells us to sharp or flat that note. But you'll find that it also appears in the musical score right next to the treble clef. If a particular line of space is sharped or flatted here, it means that all notes of that line or space are sharped or flatted throughout the piece. For example, the flatted B at the beginning here tells you  that all B's should be flatted.

You may have noticed something else in sheet music: occasionally there are notes above and below the regular staff lines. Middle C is a good example. Small "ledger" lines are drawn to accommodate them. They are just a continuation of the lines and spaces above or below them.

Timing

Rhythm is an important part of music. Everyone likes to tap their toes to the rhythm of a song, and everyone is familiar with the fact the the rhythm varies from song to song, and even within a song. And the major reason for this is that notes do not all have the same time values. In the music shown above all the notes are represented by open ovals. They are referred to as whole notes, but as we will see, there are other types of notes with different time values.

The whole note (shown below) has four beats; we also have half, quarter, eighth, and sixteen notes. They are designated as follows.

For the half note we have two beats, for the quarter note, one beat, and so on. Also, eighth and sixteen notes are frequently joined together with a little bar. Both are equivalent to a quarter note. Occasionally, you'll also see a dot after a note. This means the note has half again as much value as the note shown. Also, the stems in all of the above notes are shown as extending upward;  you've no doubt seen some in sheet music that have stems extending downward. The rule is: any notes below B (the center line) usually have their stems up; those above have their stems down. Those on B can be up or down. I should mention, however, that this rule is not strictly adhered to, particularly when the stems are joined together.

Another things you'll see in sheet music is rests. They indicate places where no notes are played (in other words, your fingers are at rest). And as you might expect, there is one for each type of note. They are designated as follows.

Also, there is the tie between two notes. It is designated by a curved line, and it means that the note is to be held (and not replayed).

Finally, it's important to note that music differs in the number of beats to the bar. Two of the most common are 4/4 with four beats to the bar and the waltz with three beats to the bar (it is called 3/4 time). Another relatively common one is "c" which has four beats to the bar.


An Introduction to Scales

To many people the word "scales" brings back bad memories. Everyone who has taken classical lessons had to practise scales, and most people hated playing them over and over, and I can sympathize with them. This section, however, is addressed to the readers who know nothing about scales, and as you'll see it is helpful to be familiar with them. But don't worry, I won't try to make you practise them over and over.

Let's begin with the C scale. In some ways it is the simplest scale because it consists entirely of white notes. Start with middle C and play all the white notes upward for an octave. This is the C major scale, and it's easy to see that it's pretty simple; it consists of the notes C D E F G A B C' (note that I refer to the upper C as C' to distinguish it from middle C). The nice thing about knowing one scale is that you can easily determine all scales from it, and the way you do this is look carefully at how the scale made up. Looking at the difference between C and D, we see that there is a black note between them; in the same way there is a black note between D and E. We refer to the difference in tone as "one tone," and for convenience I'll write it as T. When we look at the notes  E and F, however, we see that there is no black note between them; we refer to this tonal difference as a "half tone," and we designate it as h (note also, that there is a half tone between any black and white note next to one another).

Continuing in this way up the scale we find more tones and half tone. In fact, for the entire octave we get T T h T T T h. This is a sequence that is worth memorizing, and the reason is that all major scales are made up of it. To see the significance of this, let's apply it to G; in other words, start at G and move up the keyboard one octave according to the above sequence. You will get the notes G A B C D F-sharp, G'.  We see that this scale (which is the G scale) has one black note in it, namely F -sharp.

Now let's consider the F scale. Again, begin on F and apply the sequence to the octave above it. You will get  F G A B-flat C D E F'. So, how does all this help us? To answer this, look at the music associated with a few songs (I'm sure you have some around). You'll see that each song is written in a particular key, and you can tell what key this is by looking at the staff at the beginning of the song. If it has no sharps or flats it is written in the key of C; if it has one sharp it is written in G,and if it has one flat it is in F. Furthermore, if you look at a lot of songs you'll see that many of them are written in one of these three keys; indeed, if you throw in the keys of B-flat and E-flat you have about ninety-five percent of all popular songs. And, as you'll see, knowing what key a song is in, is of prime importance.