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The first time you see the keyboard of a Piano is daunting…there are 88 keys in total and it seems an impossible task to memorise all those notes! Fear not, there is a simple way.
Here we have an example of how the piano looks at a first glance. The first thing we notice is the white and black keys, but among the black ones we can clearly see two patterns; there are keys that are grouped by 2 and others by 3, and always one after the other group. This is the first pattern that it raises our attention so we can spot the place of all the notes right away.
On the first picture above we have two arrows below the Keyboard: the one on the left side depicts the sounds going “down or lower” and the one on the right “going up or higher” This doesn’t show spatial directions, but “pitch” directions or motions. In music when we say go up or high means that the sounds go towards the right side of the piano, conversely, when we say that a sound is lower is because we play it towards the left side of the keyboard, hence the arrows.
When you group these two patterns of notes (2 and 3 black keys) and we count from the first note (at the left side of the 2 black key groups) to the last note of the pattern (at the right side of the 3 black key groups) we see that there are 8 notes within it. This group of 8 notes is called an “octave”. Here is a picture to show how to count:
From this D note, we can infer the rest!
Now we can see all the notes displayed on the keyboard within the range of an octave (8 keys). Notice that the D note we just saw is from the middle of the two black keys. Each note has a very specific place on the keyboard, with time you will find them easily.