Piano keys notes how to#

You’ll have to do some more research if you want to get deep in those musical theory weeds! It’s simply not necessary for our purposes. Believe me when I saw that the reasons for this are way outside the scope of this post. The basis for most of music theory today is the 12 notes that make up the Western music scale. Apparently, our brains are pretty good at understanding what notes do or don’t “fit” in certain combinations. You probably already knew this, because if you’ve ever hit a wrong note on the piano you felt immediately that something was wrong. 😉 Do we usually play them all in a song ? No way! Just because you have all these notes does not mean they all sound good together. What You PlayĪ standard 88-key piano or keyboard has… you guessed it: 88 keys. But I still think it’s pretty cool to find that all vibrations can be so easily divided or multiplied depending on how high or low you go for a given note. Like I said, these numbers aren’t really important for our purposes. If you do the math, you’ll see that this means the next A note is vibrating twice as fast. But for example, the center A note on your piano vibrates at 440 times per second, which is called 440 hertz (hz). So, how fast do these different notes actually vibrate? It actually shouldn’t matter to you unless you are dabbling in sound tech or related fields. This is the math of sound waves: playing different versions of the same note will result in sound waves that are mathematically related to each other. When you play a higher version, the vibration is twice as fast, or four times as fast, and so on. That’s because if you play a low version of that note, you are causing a vibration that is half as fast, or a quarter as fast, or an eight as fast…. If you play any specific note on your piano or keyboard, and then a higher version, they all sound similar. In fact, unless you’re tone deaf you probably can do a pretty cool thing without even trying: hearing when certain notes are just higher or lower versions of themselves. One of the many awesome things your brain can do is notice similarities between certain sounds and notes. That’s a good thing: too many notes would actually not sound nearly as good! More on Sound Vibrations All instruments have a limit to how much they can vibrate, so that limits what range of notes they can play. So moving “up” aka to the right will always mean higher pitch on your piano keys, and vice versa.Īlthough there really is no theoretical limit on what sounds (aka vibrations) could exist, you’ve probably already realized that there isn’t an infinite number of piano notes or musical notes. The lower piano notes have longer, slower vibrations. The inside of your piano is built so that higher notes have a smaller, faster vibration. If you’ve ever run your fingers across the keys, you can hear the pitch incrementally rising or falling (depending on which direction you’re going). Piano notes run low to high from left to right. No matter what instrument you’re on, steady vibrations are what each note you play is actually made of. Regardless of how high or low you want your note, maintaining a steady vibration at the right speed is the key to producing a specific note. But slow vibrations mean lower, deeper sounds. If something vibrates fast, it produces a high pitch. So it’s not just a BeeGee’s idea to try and find good vibrations. And the most simple explanation of what notes are? Vibrations that sound good while staying consistently at one pitch. So simply put, all sounds really are just vibrations. Depending on how quickly something is vibrating, the pitch of that sound will change. Those waves are what vibrate your eardrums and tell your brain to interpret them as sounds. If you could see sound, it would look like waves. And that’s what this video is all about: What Is a Note?

Piano keys notes how to#

It’s a little complicated, but fortunately you don’t need to know too much music theory to understand piano notes and how to use them. Piano notes: they’re probably the first thing you picture when you think about playing, right? But what are they? What’s the difference between piano notes and just any random sound?