To someone who doesn’t know how to play the piano, the 88 keys that a piano has would naturally look daunting and the thought of being able to name them all would seem almost impossible. While the piano does have a lot of notes, there’s a way to break things down so it makes learning what the notes are called a whole lot easier.
So if you look at a piano keyboard, you will immediately spot the white notes and the black notes. If you have a closer look at the black notes you should easily be able to see that there are groups of two black notes and groups of three black notes and they alternate all the way up and down the piano keyboard. What these black notes are actually called will be explained a bit later.
If you turn your attention to the white notes, you will find that they are all named after the first seven letters of the alphabet and then the names are repeated several times. The white notes are called A,B,C,D,E,F or G and they are in that order too. When you get to a G, the white note next to it on the right is called A and then the process repeats with the B followed by C,D,E,F etc. The cycle is repeated several times, so the note names of A,B,C etc are used several times.
If you find C on a piano, you should notice that it is immediately left of a group of two black notes.
Actually, all C’s are found immediately left of every group of 2 black notes. If you are looking at a
group of three black notes, the white note to the immediate left is F, not C.
So here’s a run down on how to find each note:
A – to the right of the middle black note, in the group of three black notes
B – to the right of the whole group of three black notes
C – to the left of the group of two black notes
D – is between the group of two black notes
E – to the right of the group of two black notes
F – to the left of the group of three black notes
G – to the left of the middle black note, in the group of three black notes
Getting back to the names of the black notes, they are named in relation to the white notes and
therefore have two different names. They are called sharp when you look at them from the
perspective of being on the right of a particular white note, so the left black note in the group of three
black notes is called F sharp because the white note that is immediately to the left of the group of
three black notes is F. That same black note can also be called G flat in some circumstances,
simply because it is to the immediate left of a G.
It may initially seem daunting to learn the names of all the notes on the piano keyboard. Hopefully,
you can see that there are a couple of patterns, that once known and applied, make it very easy to
name any and every note found on the piano.