Really glad to hear it helped, Kevin!

Glad it was helpful Shane!

You're welcome, Patricia!

I'm glad it works for you, Lukáš - hopefully there are a few things in there that will give you some more ideas. Thanks for starting the discussion that gave me the idea for the tutorial!

That's actually a really interesting idea, Gary - I guess, given what you say about relative ease (and I agree), the reason we ask piano learners to focus on white note keys first is that it's easier from a music *reading* point of view (fewer flats and sharps cluttering up the score...), which in terms of the physical act of playing the piano perhaps isn't as logical as it might seem. What's your experience with this kind of thing? Do you have particular key preferences?

@@BillHilton Bill, I'm far too poor a musician and perpetual beginner to advise people who actually know what they're doing, so take anything I say about this with a few barrels of salt. That said, one idea that has occurred to me is to treat a piano (or nowadays, a keyboard) as a transposing instrument. That is, you can write music for beginners in C/Am with no confusing sharps or flats but still let them use the F# key for a C, G# for a D, and so on, so you're playing mainly on the black keys and a couple of isolated white keys. Or less confusingly, let the student initially learn the lines and spaces of the staff as "note 1," "note 2," and so on, sort of Nashville style. Then everything for beginners can be written in C major / A minor for ease of reading, but played in a different key that's easier physically, like F#. They don't even need to know the letter names at the outset, just what key is #1, what's #2, and so on. I'm not suggesting misleading the student. In fact, I think it would be a good idea to explain what's going on and why. Or this might be a terrible idea! I don't know enough to say. I do think it helps to grasp the idea early on that there's nothing alien or special musically about the black keys, or really about sharps and flats as such except as a notational convention. It's good to know that (at least with modern tuning) every key has the same relationship to the one immediately to the left or right regardless of color. Also, scales are just patterns for what semitones are skipped, which is a concept that holds true for diatonic modes, harmonic and melodic minors, whole-tone scales, and so on. But I'm starting to ramble...

@@DGaryGrady Ramble away, Gary - it's all interesting stuff. A thing I really find interesting - since you mention modern tuning - is that many musicians will flat out insist that different keys have different characters (typically along the lines that sharp keys sound brighter/flat keys more mellow) which doesn't make much sense when you consider the physics, although I can also sometimes see what they're getting at (albeit it could be an artefact of composers tending to write mellow music in flat keys, bright music in sharp ones...). I'm also very much in favour of explaining to students WHY musical things are as they are, because I think understanding (fairly straightforward) concepts like the harmonic series can have a big effect on the way people make music. The thing above all is to think about it, as you are doing. The sure route to failure (or making bad music, which amounts to the same thing) is the habit so many adult learners have of seeing musical learning as a purely mechanical, algorithmical thing. Fascinating stuff, anyway!

@@BillHilton I've been a little suspicious myself of the notion that of keys having different emotional characters unless we're talking about a really significant difference in pitch. (And that's not really a matter of key signature as such; you could play the same piece in the same key but an octave higher or lower and it will sound pretty different!) There's also the fact that what counts as a given key isn't a fixed thing. (Here's a very informative video about that: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/grSbo7p3sZ68h3U.html). Which indirectly reminds me that in the film "The Glass Bottom Boat," Doris Day sings a song called "Soft As the Starlight" that sounds very different from the cheerful title song, though it uses the exact same melody, just played at a different tempo and with different instrumentation and vocal style. By the way, I was thinking a little more about learning to play. Perhaps a good approach would be to start with a C major scale, a simple melody, and some basic left-hand triads (possibly I, IV, and V -- plus vi for Axis of Awesome fans). Then maybe in lesson 2 introduce the same scale, melody, and triads but in C#/Db major. That scale is very easy to to learn and remember. Right away the student gets the idea of playing in different keys and not to fear the black notes as something alien. Another thing I find helpful is to realize that when playing a diatonic scale you're actually playing every other note, except for two places where you don't skip a note. For some reason I found this easier to get my mind around initially than thinking of scales in terms of tones and semitones. Re your observation about a mechanical approach to learning: In too many fields, from music to physics, students make things harder for themselves by trying to learn everything through rote memorization rather than understanding. It drives me nuts that people are taught, say, ukulele chords as mysterious formulas like something out of a spellbook. Yes, as a practical matter one has to develop muscle memory, but it still helps to understand what it is you're doing: Moving up a fret on a given string is exactly the same as moving up a piano key. If you know that C chord is CEG, then remember that your strings, top to bottom, are AECG*, so all you've got to do is either skip the A string or fret it to make it an extra C. With a tiny bit of knowledge you can work out ways to play any chord you need even if the Internet is down. * Edited to correct the order. I hope I have it right now.

OK, one more if you'll forgive me, and I apologize that this is so off-topic: Here's a clip from the film "The Glass Bottom Boat" that's unusual in that it was shot as essentially a live performance in a single take by Doris Day and Arthur Godfrey -- complete with obvious uncut mistakes -- using three cameras: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/jph8mLKjx9OzgJc.html . (The usual practice in movie musicals is to pre-record the music and then play it back during multiple takes.) And here's essentially the same melody used for what at first hearing sounds like a completely different song: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/d8qZgLdnp7XDl4E.html By the way, the latter song is attributed to Joe Lubin and Jerome Howard, and many suggest that this was the same Jerome Howard who was better known a Curly Howard of the Three Stooges. I don't know for sure one way or the other. Another film in which a lot of the music is source music -- that is, recorded live during filming -- is Hitchcock's "Rear Window." The composer in the apartment to the right was actually played by an actor who was a musician and composer, though he didn't write the music he was supposed to be composing in the film. (What he did compose and perform included the music of the Chipmunks.) Hitchcock also directed Doris Day opposite Jimmy Steward in his remake of "The Man Who Knew Too Much" in which Day sings "Qué Sera, Sera," a song she found annoyingly trivial. Naturally it proved a major hit and she kept having to sing it the rest of her life, including in the first clip above. But now I'm *really* digressing, so I'll go away!

Hope you like it, Oliver!

I'm working on (re-)integrating PayPal right now, Prasad, as well as some other payment methods, so watch this space!

It's a Nord Piano 2! This model is nearly ten years old now, but there are more recent versions :)

You're welcome!

😂

It’s the kind of question I get asked a lot. It might seem dumb to you, but for a beginner it’s not necessarily obvious why one should complicate one’s life with lots of black notes when most songs - and songs are what most people want to play - can be played in easier keys. With that in mind, the steering wheel analogy doesn’t quite work: you absolutely can’t drive a car without using the steering wheel, but you can play the piano - to an extent - without being really familiar with “black note” keys. This tutorial is about why that’s not a good approach. (It’s also the case that the apparently dumb questions that people often don’t ask for fear of looking silly are the ones that really cut to the heart of a subject, so I always think they’re worth exploring. Whether or not I do that successfully is a different matter, of course!)