The map of the keyboard

In chapter 3 the keyboard started talking in numbers: press a key and note 60 arrives, press the next white one and you get 62. That suits a computer, but it does little for a person. Where on the keyboard is note 64? How many keys do you count from the edge? And from which edge, when one keyboard has 25 keys and another 88?

Pianists don't count. They look at the keyboard the way you look at your own street: there's the corner, there's the chemist's, and our house is the third one past it. This chapter is a walk around that town. You will find the landmarks, learn the address of every white key, walk the neighbourhoods called octaves from one end to the other, try towns of different sizes, from a 25-key keyboard to a grand piano, and put your hand on the keys. Several sections have timed races, and your records are kept in this browser.

A town without landmarks

First, try walking with no landmarks at all. The card below hides the black keys, leaving a row of identical white ones. Press "Start searching" and find C. The keyboard starts somewhere new every time, so counting from the edge won't help.

Do three or four searches in "White keys only" mode, then switch to "With the black keys". Without the black keys you are guessing: C could be any of seven neighbouring white keys, and it takes several tries on average. Even if your ear says "this one sounds familiar", it's a lottery. With the black keys you barely miss from the very first search, though nobody has explained anything yet. Your eye catches the pattern on its own.

Each time you find it, labels appear around it on the whole group of keys that C belongs to. That group is the landmark. The white keys are all alike, but the black keys are spaced unevenly: in twos and threes, with gaps between the groups. That pattern is how you find your way.

"With labels" mode is there for comparison. It is the fastest, but a real MIDI keyboard has no labels, and stickers on the keys train you out of looking at the pattern. By the end of the chapter the black keys will be all you need.

Twos and threes

Look at any keyboard. The black keys go like this: two together, a gap, three together, a gap, two, three, and so on to the end. Two neighbouring black keys are a group of two, three are a group of three. Every white key sits in a fixed place relative to these groups, and that place is its address.

Around the group of two there are three white keys: C, D and E. C is to the left of the two, E to the right, and D is squeezed between the two black keys. Around the group of three there are four white keys: F, G, A and B. F is to the left of the three, B to the right, G and A inside. Seven names, seven addresses.

Note	Address
C	left of the two
D	inside the two
E	right of the two
F	left of the three
G	inside the three, first
A	inside the three, second
B	right of the three

The two addresses you need most are C and F. Both sit to the left of a group, only C's group has two black keys and F's has three. Every other white key is a step or two to the right of one of them. E and B are the neighbours on the right of the groups. Between E and F, as between B and C, there is no black key. Chapter 11 explains why that space is empty.

One habit speeds up the search more than any table: look at the group, not the key. Your eye catches a group of two or three first, because the groups are big and stand out at once, and then the key inside the group finds itself. Beginners often do the opposite. They stare at a white key and try to remember which one it is. A white key tells you nothing. It looks just like its neighbours.

Press any key in the card, white or black. It tells you its address and lights up its whole group. The "Show" switch highlights all the groups of two or all the groups of three at once, so you can see that the pattern repeats without exception.

Now the first exercise. The keyboard has no labels, the program names a note, and you press it. Any C will do, anywhere on the keyboard.

Next come the three notes around the group of two and the four around the group of three. Look for the group first, then the place in it.

And the other way round: a key lights up, and you name it. The address is the same, only now you read it with your eyes.

Without looking

Pianists hardly ever look at their hands: their eyes are busy with the music, the conductor or a screen with a piano roll. The pattern of the black keys helps here too. On a real keyboard the black keys are higher and narrower than the white ones, and your fingers find a group of two or three by touch. Try it on your MIDI keyboard: close your eyes, run your palm over the black keys and find a group of two. The key to the left of it is C.

Once you find C without thinking, add F: it is the second post, the one you measure the neighbourhood of the three from. Then all seven.

An ordinary search across all the white keys, to make it stick. This time the keyboard stays put, but the notes come in random order.

Now a race. Twenty notes in a row, the timer starts with the first, and a mistake costs you time, because you have to press again. A record counts only if at least 16 notes are found on the first try: fast guessing doesn't count.

Don't be put off if your first race was slow. A good target is a second a note, about 20 seconds for the whole race. Beyond that the limit is the speed of your fingers, not your eyes. Come back to the race in a day or two and your time will drop noticeably. There are more levels in the "Notes on the keyboard" trainer: level one is the white keys, level three the black ones, which we come to in chapter 11.

Octave after octave

The pattern of a two and a three repeats across the whole keyboard. One such stretch, seven white keys and five black, 12 keys in all, is an octave, which you know from chapter 1: the same note at twice the frequency. If the keyboard is a town, an octave is a neighbourhood, and every neighbourhood is built to the same plan. Every neighbourhood has a C, and all the Cs on the keyboard sound like the same note at different heights.

Choose a note in the card and it lights up across the whole piano. "All of them, bottom to top" plays them one after another, from the lowest to the highest. Press any key, and the card tells you which one it is counting from the bottom, its MIDI number and its frequency.

Listen to how the climb sounds: all eight Cs are clearly one note, each a little brighter and thinner than the one before. The low Cs of a piano rumble and the high ones ring, but they share a name, like identical crossroads in different neighbourhoods. So once you have found C in one place on the keyboard, you have found it everywhere: just move your eye to the next group of two.

Neighbouring Cs are 12 MIDI numbers apart: 48, 60, 72, 84. That answers the question from chapter 3 of how to find note 62 without counting. Find the nearest C (its number divides by 12) and step up from it key by key. 60 is middle C (C4), so 62 is the next white key, D, and 64 is E. Note 67 is seven keys above C: that is G, the first white key inside the three.

The octaves on the keyboard have numbers. The middle of the piano is octave 4: it begins at middle C (C4), note 60. Below it come octaves 3, 2, 1 and 0, above it 5, 6, 7 and the single C8 at the very top. The number in C4 is the octave: C3 is an octave lower, C5 an octave higher. Musicians have older names for the octaves too, and one key can have three names at once. Where they all come from is the subject of chapter 5. For now it is enough to know that octave 4 is in the middle and the numbers grow to the right.

A full-size keyboard has 88 keys. How many Cs does it have?

8 7 12

A piano starts on A and ends on C: A, B, then seven full octaves from C to B, and one more C at the very top. That makes eight Cs. There are eight As and eight Bs as well, and seven of each of the other white notes. Check it in the card above.

Now an exercise where not just any octave will do: you need the one that is named. Only the Cs are labelled, with their octave numbers, so count from them.

The program names a note together with its octave. Only the key in that octave counts: middle C is labelled, and octave 5 starts at the next C up.

And a game of speed: find every F there is on the keyboard. Each miss adds a second to your time. Each game keeps its own record.

The trickiest notes are E and B: both sit to the right of a group, and they are easy to mix up. First all the Bs, then all the Es.

25, 49 or 88

The grand piano is the biggest town, but not the only one. MIDI keyboards come with 25, 32, 37, 49, 61, 76 or 88 keys. The fewer the keys, the lighter and cheaper the keyboard, and the better it fits on a desk next to a laptop. The price is range.

In the card below, choose a size or stretch the keyboard with the slider, from one octave to 88 keys. The strip above the keyboard is the whole piano, and the frame on it shows which part of it is under your hands.

A small keyboard has the same pattern, just fewer neighbourhoods. 25 keys are two octaves plus one more C at the top: 15 white and 10 black. 49 keys are four octaves with an extra C, 61 are five. An 88-key keyboard has everything a piano has: from the lowest A (A0, note 21) to the top C (C8, note 108).

Keys	Octaves	Usually for
25	2	a rucksack, a laptop, picking out a tune or a bass line
32–37	2.5–3	the same, with room for a chord and a tune at once
49	4	a home studio: bass in the left hand, tune in the right
61	5	a common size for synths and workstations
76–88	6–7	piano pieces where the hands move far apart

What if a tune runs off the end of a small keyboard? Press the octave shift buttons. Almost every small MIDI keyboard has a pair of buttons, Octave − and Octave + (sometimes just arrows). The keys stay where they are, and only what they send changes: the same leftmost key sends 36 or 60 instead of 48. Try the "− octave" and "+ octave" buttons in the card: the frame slides along the piano, and the number in the line "The leftmost key now sends note…" changes by exactly 12.

With octave shift a small keyboard reaches every note on a piano, just not all of them at once. For a tune that is enough. It gets cramped when the left hand plays a bass line and the right hand plays a tune high above it: then you want 49 keys or more.

You have 25 keys, and the leftmost sends note 48. You press Octave + twice. What number does the same key send now?

72 50 60

Each press of Octave + adds 12 to the number: 48 → 60 → 72. You would get 50 after pressing Transpose twice, and 60 after one press of Octave +.

Cristofori's soft and loud is the velocity from chapter 3: a MIDI keyboard measures it for every key and sends it as a number from 1 to 127.

The computer keyboard

If you have no MIDI keyboard, the whole course works on the computer keyboard. The middle row, from A to ', is the white keys, and the row above is the black ones: W and E are a group of two, T Y U a group of three, and O and P the next group of two. R between E and T is left out, in the place where a piano has no black key between E and F. The pattern of the groups survives here too.

The row of letters holds an octave and a half: 18 keys, from C to the F of the next octave. Z and X work like the octave shift buttons on a MIDI keyboard: the frame on the piano strip moves, and A plays the C an octave lower or higher. The layout doesn't matter, because the course looks at where a key is, not at its letter. On a French AZERTY keyboard the key in the place of A is marked Q, and it still plays C.

Hands and fingers

Finding the key is half the job. You still have to press it, preferably with the right finger. Pianists number their fingers: finger numbers run from the thumb to the little finger: the thumb is 1, the index finger 2, the middle finger 3, the ring finger 4 and the little finger 5. The numbering is the same for both hands, so it is a mirror image: on the right hand 1 is on the left, on the left hand it is on the right.

The simplest way to place your hand is the five-finger position: five fingers on five neighbouring white keys, one finger to a key. In C position the right hand puts its thumb on middle C and its little finger on G. The left hand puts its little finger on the C below middle C (C3) and its thumb on G. The fingers are slightly curved, as if holding a small ball, and touch the keys with their pads.

Press the keys of the position and watch which finger lights up. Switch hands: the position is the same, but the numbers run the other way. Move the position to D or G: the pattern of the fingers stays the same, only the keys under them change. In this position the hand can't reach keys outside it: to play them, you move the hand. Chapter 16 shows how, and that is where numbers appear above the notes.

Now something harder: the hands take turns, and the fingers in the picture have no numbers. You have to turn the number into a finger yourself, and remember that on the left hand 1 is on the right.

Why the thumb is 1 and not 0

It wasn't always so. In 19th-century Britain the thumb was marked with a cross (+) or a nought, and the other fingers were numbered 1 to 4. From the early 20th century the British went over to the continental numbering from 1 to 5, and now it is the same all over the world. In old English editions a 1 above a note means the index finger.

What's next

Now you have a map. You can find any white key by the groups of black keys, on any keyboard and from any starting point. You can see the octaves across the whole keyboard and turn a MIDI number into a key: 60 is middle C, and 12 more is an octave up. You know what a small MIDI keyboard can and can't do, how to shift it by an octave and how to put your hand in position.

One question remains, and we have been walking around it all chapter. We call the same key "C", "C4" and "60". Where do the syllables do, re, mi come from, why do programs use letters, and why does German sheet music have an H where an English one has a B? That is the next chapter: a thousand-year investigation, from Guido of Arezzo and his hymn to MIDI numbers.

The Notebook shows the notes you have recorded on a keyboard: the more often a note sounds in your recording, the brighter its key. Record something and see which neighbourhoods your tune lives in. In chapter 5 the notes in the Notebook get names: syllables, letters or numbers, as you prefer.