THE BASICS AND SCALES

Navigating a keyboard and playing different scales

1

The layout of black and white keys has been standard on most piano and keyboard instruments for centuries, but how do you find your way around it? With 88 keys, a full-size piano keyboard might look intimidating, but it’s really just the same group of 12 notes – or octave – repeated seven times, with a few extra thrown in at the top. 2

If we examine the keyboard, we can see that the black notes are arranged in alternating two and three-note clusters. If you zoom in on a section of the keyboard and find any cluster of two black notes, the white note immediately to its left will be a C. On an 88-note keyboard, there will be eight C-notes in total, with C8 at the very top. 3

This works anywhere on the keyboard to be able to find any C-note. The note known as middle C will, naturally, be the one in the very centre of the keyboard. If we do the same thing, but this time homing in on a cluster of three black notes instead of two, the white note immediately to the left will be the note F. 4

Counting two white notes down the keyboard from a C gets us to the note A. From there, it’s just a question of filling in the gaps to get the names of the other white notes in between. Once we get to G, we start again at A (there’s no H, except in the German system, which replaces the ‘B’ we use in the UK/US with ‘H’). We get A, B, C, D, E, F, G.