The five-finger position
Five fingers on five keys, a complete melody, and two ways of playing it that turn it into two different songs.
Up to now you have learned where things are and how the hand stands. Today you play a melody — a real one, a familiar one, from the first note to the last.
And the loveliest thing about it is what it does not ask of you: the hand never moves from its spot, not once. All five notes you need are already sitting under your five fingers, and the only job left is dropping the right one at the right moment.
Place your right hand so that finger one sits on middle C, and from there rightward: two on D, three on E, four on F, five on G.
Check three things before you play a single note. That the hand is keeping the dome shape from the previous lesson. That every finger is already touching its own key, even the ones that are not playing yet. And that the wrist is loose and in a straight line with the forearm.
Those five fingers on those five keys are home base. As long as you stay inside it there is nothing at all to remember except the number of the finger.
One last thing before you play, and it is a small spoiler for the melody in the next section: the fingers do not share the work out fairly. The right-hand column counts how many times each finger gets used in the tune you are about to learn.
| Finger | Note | Times it plays in the melody below |
|---|---|---|
| One (thumb) | C | 3 |
| Two | D | 10 |
| Three | E | 11 |
| Four | F | not once |
| Five | G | 2 |
Yes, the fourth finger — the one everybody complains about — has the day off entirely. That is not an accident of this particular tune; beginner melodies are written that way on purpose, and by the time finger four is asked to work you will have a much better hand to ask with.
Here is the melody almost every piano book on earth opens with, and you already know how it goes: “Mary Had a Little Lamb”. It is built entirely out of the five notes sitting under your fingers. The numbers below are finger numbers, and they are simultaneously the notes — that is precisely the advantage of home base.
First line: three, two, one, two, three, three, three. Second line: two, two, two, three, five, five. Third line: three, two, one, two, three, three, three, three, two, two, three, two, one.
Read it out loud before you play a note of it. Then play it slowly, roughly one note a second, with no attempt whatsoever to keep time. Once it is familiar to your ear, and only then, you add the time back in.
You will hear immediately that this is a melody and not an exercise. That matters more than it sounds: the brain learns a musical sequence several times faster than an arbitrary one, and that is exactly why this lesson starts with a song instead of a scale.
A question worth answering right now, because the answer explains half of the course.
The five keys under your fingers are five consecutive white keys. There is not a single black key among them, so the hand lies flat, even and comfortable. That is why every method book on the shelf starts there — not because of any sanctity attaching to the note C.
And here is the price of that choice: it is also the least comfortable place for the fingers over the long run. Experienced pianists actually prefer positions that include black keys, because the blacks are higher and hold the hand in its natural curve. But that is a second-year matter, and in the first year early comfort wins the argument.
What is worth trying today is moving the whole house. Put finger one on G instead of C and keep the identical shape: one finger to each white key, five keys in a row. Now play the same melody by exactly the same numbers.
It will sound the same, only higher. You have learned nothing new whatsoever, and yet you now have that melody in two places on the instrument. This is precisely what people mean when they say the piano is a logical instrument: one shape, many places.
Notice one thing, though: starting from G, home base is no longer entirely white. For the melody to sound exactly the same, the fourth key along needs to be the black one rather than the white. For now, just play the five white keys and you will hear one note come out slightly crooked. That is not a failure on your part — it is exactly the subject of accidentals later in the course.
So far you have played notes. Music begins the moment each note has a length.
Metronome at 60 — one note per beat, and that's it
The box opens below and keeps ticking away while you read and play. Here is how to work with it:
The one rule that really matters here: the tempo does not move just because the passage got hard. Anyone who slows down at the difficult bar and speeds up at the easy one is teaching themselves to play without a pulse, and you can still hear it two years later.
Play the melody again, and this time lift each finger only after the next finger has already gone down. The notes spill into one another with no hole in between them. That is called legato, and it is the default setting for most melodies.
Now play it with every note cut off the instant it sounds — the finger drops and springs straight back up. The notes come out short, detached and very nearly comic. That is called staccato.
Two versions of exactly the same notes, and two completely different pieces of music. Notice what you just did there: you did not change a single note, and you changed the song anyway. That is more or less the whole of what performance is.
Now take your left hand and put finger five on the F below middle C, so that finger one — the thumb — lands exactly on middle C itself.
It is the same five-finger position and the same five notes, simply approached from the other side. Play the same melody with it, by the same numbers.
It will be clumsy. That is completely normal: this hand has never in its life been asked to make fine, precise movements. Five minutes a day is enough, and the gap between the two hands closes far faster than it seems to during the first week.
Do not play with both hands together yet. That is a whole subject of its own, and it arrives in the next course, when there is actually something worth playing in two hands. A great many people try it far too early, fail, and conclude from that failure that they are not musical.
Five minutes a day beats an hour on Saturday. That is not a piece of general advice — it is the single most useful fact in this entire course.
The reason is that what you are building here is not knowledge but movement memory, and movement memory is built in the time between sessions. Seven short sittings across a week will take you considerably further than one long one, even when the total number of minutes is larger in the second case.
And a trick for measuring it: play the melody three times in a row without a mistake, with the metronome running, and write down the tempo. Do the same thing again tomorrow. That number climbs quickly, and watching it climb is the only way to know that you are progressing rather than merely feeling that you are progressing.
If practice starts getting boring, try playing the melody at different volumes: once almost whispered, once loud. That is already work on dynamics, and it too gets built from the very first day.
| What happens | The likely cause | The fix |
|---|---|---|
| The hand slides out of position | The thumb has wandered off C | Fix the thumb in place; it is the anchor for everything else |
| One note refuses to sound | That finger lifted away from its key | Every finger keeps contact, including when it is not playing |
| You speed up in the easy bar | You are not counting out loud | Count out loud, even when it feels completely unnecessary |
| The notes are uneven in volume | The ring finger, as usual | Slow down until they are even, then take the tempo back up |
| The left hand simply refuses | It is untrained, nothing more | Five minutes a day, on its own |
| The notes stick to one another | The previous finger never released | Practice it staccato for a day; that clears it up |
You have a melody, you have a tempo, and you have two hands that know how to stand. Now it is time to stop playing one note at a time and start playing three at once — and that is the whole of the next course.