Beginning On The Piano? Things You Already Know How To Play

Things that you already know about playing the piano

One of the great things about learning to play the piano is that you will probably be surprised at how quickly you can perform certain things with the keyboard right away. You also already know a few pertinent musical facts.

You can play pentatonic scale.

If you play a sequence of black keys on the piano up or down, you have just played a 5 note scale that is known as the pentatonic scale.

You know the names of the musical notes.

The 7 main musical notes in music are denoted by alphabetic letters ranging from A through G. When you play the white keys you play notes like C, F, A, D and E. By playing the subsequent black keys you add a sharp or flat to those letters to name the black keys.

You can name the 2 clefs used in reading piano music.

You read musical notations by using the treble and the base clef. Most of the time your right hand plays notes in the treble clef and your left hand plays notes in the base clef.

You know the total number of keys on a standard piano.

Pianos are commonly referred to the old 88s as well. The reason is that if you were to count all the keys from one end to the other on a standard full-sized keyboard or piano, you will find 88 keys.

There is a pattern of 12 consecutive black and white keys from the right and of the keyboard to the left. There are 7 of these groups and the first 4 keys that begin another group before the keyboard ends. That brings up the tally to 7 multiplied into 12 equals 84+4 extra equals 88.

You can identify common styles of music

You can probably already identified some popular styles of music. For example, when you hear classical sonata from Bach or Beethoven, you can easily distinguish it from a Blues piece on a Jazz peace being played on the piano.