First, on the front of your piano you will notice an arrangement of keys distribute among black and white keys. This form what is called a keyboard, which it much easier than the one on a child’s computer keyboard.

Mostly they are interlaced (a white key followed by a black key) but not always. In those cases, two white key sit side by side. Black key are group together by 5. And in this group you will notice a first sub group of 3 followed by another sub group of 2. Combine with this group of 5, they are 7 white keys. The 5 black keys and the 7 white keys form a repetitive group of 12 keys which will spread all the way along the keyboard.

You can easily locate one key in one group, and find the correspondent key in another group. The groups form a pattern. Each key (black or white) is a note in this pattern. For beginners, you will notice that each of the white key (or note) is identified by a letter of the alphabet starting from A to G (since there are 7 white key).

What make the difference from one group of 12 from another one? It is what we call the pitch. The group at the left has a lower pitch and the group at the right has a higher pitch. Try it out with any note and you will hear the difference.

An octave is the distance from any note in one pattern to the same note in adjacent pattern. Why is it called an octave is because they are 8 note (white one) from the first to the second. Music will be written with a group of 5 lines aligned horizontally which is called a staff. You will write note (represented by circle) directly on the line or between them. The higher the note is on the staff, the higher the sound it represents (and the farther it will be on your piano keyboard).

Some note will need imaginary line (little stretch of line) either bellow or above the regular staff, because they won’t fit in the staff. In the case of the piano, they are so many notes that another staff will be needed. Since they are two, they there is a need to differentiate them. A symbol called a clef is used. The higher staff is use a clef named ‘Treble’, and the second one use a clef named ‘Bass’. The notes on the treble clef are played with the right hand and the notes on the bass clef are played with the left hand.