Meeting the instrument and sitting down
Seven names, one pattern that keeps repeating, and a zero point you can find with your eyes shut. Plus: how to sit so that nothing hurts.
Let's start with the good news. The piano is the only instrument where every note is laid out in front of you in a single row, left to right, low to high. There are no strings to count, and there aren't six different places to play the same note. What looks from the outside like a wall of keys is really one small pattern, repeating itself over and over and over.
By the end of this page you'll be able to read that pattern, find the key everything starts from with your eyes shut, and sit at the instrument in a way that won't ache twenty minutes later.
A full piano has eighty-eight keys. That sounds frightening right up until you count how many names are involved: seven. C, D, E, F, G, A, B — and then it begins again from C.
Everything past that point is the same seven names at other heights. The key called C in the middle of the instrument and the key called C at the far right end are the same note exactly, only higher. The distance between them is called an octave, and to the ear they sound so alike that it is hard to believe two different keys are producing them.
Not everybody spells those names with letters. Half the world sings them instead — Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Ti — and if you have ever heard that sung in a film, you already know the middle column of the table below. The two systems describe exactly the same seven things, and you will run into both: the chord pages on this site are written in letters, while plenty of teachers still sing the syllables out loud.
| Note | Sung as | Where you find it |
|---|---|---|
| C | Do | Just left of the group of two black keys |
| D | Re | Between the two black keys |
| E | Mi | Just right of the group of two black keys |
| F | Fa | Just left of the group of three black keys |
| G | Sol | Between the first and second of the three |
| A | La | Between the second and third of the three |
| B | Ti | Just right of the group of three black keys |
Here is the single most important thing in this lesson, and it takes about thirty seconds to learn.
Look at the black keys. They are not scattered at random — they alternate in groups of two and groups of three. Two, three, two, three, all the way along the instrument.
That is the map. Without it, every white key looks identical to every other; with it, you know exactly where you are without counting a thing. Try it right now: run a finger along the keyboard and say out loud, “two, three, two, three.” Within half a minute your eye starts seeing groups instead of a row.
The black keys are also narrower and sit higher than the whites, which makes them easy to find both at a glance and by touch alone. That is why an experienced pianist can land on a note without ever taking their eyes off the page.
Now to find zero.
Find the group of two black keys nearest the middle of the instrument — roughly opposite the maker's logo, or on a digital piano roughly opposite the screen. The white key sitting immediately to the left of those two blacks is middle C.
That's it. That is the entire story, and it works on every piano on earth.
Middle C is the reference point for everything that comes next: the right hand starts there, the left hand is measured from it, and in written music it is the note that sits exactly between the two staves. People tend to stick a label on it in the first week. Don't — after three days of finding it by the group of two you will get there faster than you could find a sticker, and the sticker only postpones the learning.
That is a C major chord on the keys, and the three notes marked on it sit exactly in the region your hand is in right now. There is no need to play it today. It is here only so you can watch the map you just learned doing its job: the leftmost note on the card is the very key you found just left of the two blacks.
The chord dictionary — see how C major sits on the keys
On a guitar, a poor position gives you a buzzing note within seconds. On a piano it gives you a sore back half an hour later, which is far too late for you to connect the two.
Bench height before anything else. Sit down, put your hands on the keys, and look at your elbows. They want to be roughly level with the keys or a touch above them — not below. Elbows below the keys means you are pushing upward, and that empties your shoulders in minutes. No adjustable bench? A flat cushion on an ordinary chair solves it perfectly well.
Sit on the front edge of the bench, not deep inside it. Sitting deep locks your pelvis and stops your body drifting slightly right and left, and you are going to want that movement the moment your hands travel away from one another.
Feet flat on the floor. They are the base you balance on. One leg folded underneath you tips the whole body to one side, and you can hear that later on in the sound.
Distance from the instrument: close enough to reach both ends without shifting your seat, far enough that your elbows do not jam into your ribs. About a forearm's length back from the edge.
Shoulders down and loose. They will climb on their own the moment something gets difficult, and that is a reliable signal to stop and breathe.
This question comes up every single time, so here is a straight answer.
Eighty-eight keys is a full piano, and it is what you will meet in concert halls and conservatories. Seventy-six covers very nearly all of the pop, rock and jazz repertoire. Sixty-one is entirely enough for a first year, and for a good while after it — every lesson in this course fits comfortably inside sixty-one keys.
Two things do matter more than the number of keys:
Weighted action. On an acoustic piano the key drives a hammer, so it pushes back against your finger. A cheap keyboard with springy keys is a completely different instrument, and somebody who spends a year on one discovers they have no finger strength at all when they finally sit down at a real piano. If you are choosing an instrument, look for the words “weighted” or “hammer action” before you so much as glance at the key count.
Touch sensitivity. The instrument has to sound loud when you press hard and soft when you press gently. Without that, the entire dynamics chapter later in this course simply does not exist for you.
And what does not matter at this stage: the number of built-in sounds, the speakers, the screen. Not one of them will teach you to play.
Put the middle finger of your right hand on middle C and press. Release. Press again, harder this time.
You heard two notes at different volumes. That is the whole difference between a keyboard instrument and a button: the speed at which the key travels down is what sets the volume, not the force you apply once it is already at the bottom. Leaning on a key that is lying still adds nothing whatsoever except tension in your arm.
Now try something else: press and hold. The note fades slowly. Lift the finger — it is cut off at once. The thing that stops it is called a damper, and it is exactly what the pedal, later in the course, will teach you to lift.
One more experiment: run a single finger across several white keys in a row, bottom to top. You just played a scale. Without knowing anything, without fingering, without a scrap of theory. That is the great advantage of this instrument, and it is precisely why you can be playing a melody on it as soon as the third lesson.
| What happens | The likely cause | The fix |
|---|---|---|
| You lose track of where you are on the instrument | You are reading the white keys instead of the black ones | Go back to the groups of two and three; they are the only map there is |
| Shoulders climb after a few minutes | The bench is too low | Raise it until your elbows are level with the keys |
| The wrist starts to hurt | The hand is resting on the instrument between notes | The hand floats; the weight comes down only at the moment of the press |
| Every note comes out at the same volume | The instrument is not touch sensitive | Not your fault at all; that is a limit of the hardware |
| You can only find C with a sticker | The pattern has not reached your eye yet | Peel the sticker off for three days; it works |
One more thing worth knowing in advance: an acoustic piano drifts out of tune over time, and tuning it is a job for a technician with dedicated tools — not something you do yourself, and not something an app does on your behalf. A digital instrument, by contrast, never goes out of tune at all. If you are starting out on a digital one, this entire subject simply does not exist for you this year.
You have a map, you have a zero point, and you have a way of sitting. What you need now is a hand that knows how to stand on the keys, and that is exactly the next lesson.