Lesson 1: Pitch, Notes and the Piano Keyboard

Welcome! Let's Start With a Sound

Hi, and welcome to your first level! You love music, and maybe you can already pick out a tune by ear. Now we're going to find out how it works. We'll start right at the beginning, with one simple idea: pitch.

Try this. Hum the lowest note you can, then slide up to the highest note you can. Feel how your voice climbed? You just moved through pitch.

What Is Pitch?

Pitch is how high or low a sound is. That's all it means.

A bird's tweet has a high pitch. A big truck rumbling past has a low pitch. Think of a tuba and a piccolo: the tuba sits way down low and the piccolo sits way up high.

So what makes a sound high or low? It comes down to vibration. Every sound is something vibrating: a string, a column of air, your vocal cords. Fast vibrations give you a high pitch. Slow vibrations give you a low pitch. We measure vibrations per second in hertz (Hz).

You don't need to remember the numbers. Just hold on to the picture: faster means higher, slower means lower.

Meet the Piano Keyboard

The piano is the best map of pitch you'll ever get. Why? Because it lays every note out in a straight line, from left to right.

Here's the golden rule: as you move to the right, the pitch goes up. As you move to the left, the pitch goes down. Low notes live on the left, high notes on the right.

A full-size piano has 88 keys: 52 white keys and 36 black keys. That sounds like a lot, doesn't it? Don't worry. There's a pattern that repeats over and over, and once you've learned it you've learned the whole keyboard.

The Musical Alphabet: Just Seven Letters

The white keys are named with letters. But here's a lovely surprise: we only use seven of them.

A B C D E F G

Then what comes after G? You start again at A! It goes A B C D E F G A B C D E F G A, round and round, like the days of the week. After Sunday comes Monday again.

Going up (to the right), you go forward through the alphabet. Going down (to the left), you go backwards: G F E D C B A G F.

Your Secret Weapon: The Black Keys

How do you know which white key is which? They all look the same! The trick is to use the black keys as signposts.

Look at a keyboard and you'll see the black keys come in groups: a group of two, then a group of three, then two, then three, all the way along.

Picture it in words, from left to right:

white, BLACK, white, BLACK, white, white, BLACK, white, BLACK, white, BLACK, white

That's one complete pattern: seven white keys and five black keys. Now for the landmarks.

• C is the white key just to the left of the group of two black keys.
• D is the white key sitting between the two black keys. (Think: D for "doghouse", the dog snug between two walls.)
• E is just to the right of the two black keys.
• F is the white key just to the left of the group of three black keys.
• G and A sit between the three black keys.
• B is just to the right of the three black keys.

Find C, and you can count up the alphabet from there: C D E F G A B, then C again.

One C deserves a special mention. The C nearest the middle of the piano is called middle C. It's a handy home base, and we'll keep coming back to it.

What About the Black Keys' Names?

Good question! The black keys borrow their names from their white neighbours.

Take the black key between C and D. It's a little higher than C, so we can call it C sharp (written C♯). It's also a little lower than D, so we can call it D flat (written D♭). Same key, two names.

So sharp means "a bit higher" and flat means "a bit lower". That gives you the five black keys in each pattern: C♯/D♭, D♯/E♭, F♯/G♭, G♯/A♭ and A♯/B♭.

Notice there's no black key between E and F, or between B and C. That gap is exactly why the black keys fall into groups of two and three. We'll explore why later. For now, just enjoy the fact that you can name every key on the piano!

What's an Octave?

Play any C, then count up the white keys until you reach the next C. That's eight white keys, counting both Cs. The distance between them is called an octave ("oct" means eight, like an octopus's eight arms).

Here's the magic. Play those two Cs and listen. They sound like the same note, one higher and one lower. That's why they share a name!

There's a neat reason for this. The higher note vibrates exactly twice as fast as the lower one. For example, the A above middle C is usually tuned to 440 Hz, and the next A up is 880 Hz.

A man and a woman singing the "same" tune together are often singing an octave apart without even thinking about it.

Let's Play!

You don't need a real piano. Open Chrome Music Lab's Shared Piano in any web browser. It's free, and you don't need to sign up or install anything. You can click the keys, tap them on a touch screen or use your computer keyboard.

Your exercise:

1. Find a group of two black keys and play the C just to its left.
2. Play C D E F G A B C going to the right. Hear the pitch rise?
3. Now come back down: C B A G F E D C. Hear it fall?
4. Find every C you can see on the screen and play them one by one. Same note, different heights!
5. Bonus: play the black key between F and G. What are its two names?

Quick check: if you're on an F and move one white key to the left, where do you land? (Answer: E, just to the right of the two black keys.)

Key Takeaways

• Pitch is how high or low a sound is. Faster vibration means higher pitch.
• On a keyboard, right is higher and left is lower.
• The musical alphabet uses just seven letters, A to G, and then repeats.
• C sits just left of the two black keys, and F sits just left of the three.
• Black keys are sharps (a bit higher) or flats (a bit lower) of their neighbours, so each one has two names.
• An octave is the distance from one note to the next note with the same name. The higher note vibrates twice as fast.