A Piano Tutorial for Scientists

FAQ What's New

Table of Contents [show]     1 Who should read this tutorial?     2 How is this tutorial organized?     3 Get to know the keyboard     4 Get to know the staff     5 How to use your hands and body       5.1 Correct body position[D]       5.2 Correct arm position[D]       5.3 Correct hand position     6 Tutorials Copyright Information All rights reserved by the author of this article. Some of the images in this article may have different copyright licenses. Please follow the URLs of the images for detailed information about their specific copyright licenses. Contact webmasters for more information on copyright issues. 1 Who should read this tutorial? This is a piano tutorial for people with science and engineering background. Music jargon has been tranlated into engineering or science terms, and the tutorial is organized to fit a scientist's way of thinking. 2 How is this tutorial organized? From a scientist's point of view, there are three factors for playing piano: the keyboard (or the piano), the staff, and your hands. The remainder of this tutorial explains these three factors one by one: First, you get to know what's on the keyboard, what you'll get when you press a specific key. Second comes a brief introduction of staff. At last, it's your hands who connected these two things together: you read the staff and play the notes on the keyboard. 3 Get to know the keyboard [S] A keyboard has dozens of keys, but do not be overwhelmed. You only need to learn 12 notes: a piano keyboard is devided into groups of twelve notes. Each group contains five black keys and 7 white keys with white keys as C,D,E,F,G,A,B in that order, and a black key sharpens its left neighbor and dulls the neighbor on its right. For example, the black key between D and E is C sharp or D flat. Note that C starts a 12-note group, and C is always the white key on the left side of two-black-keys (as you see, each neighborhood of black keys contains either 2 or three keys). Note that keyboards may have different lengths, therefore they may have different numbers of 12-note groups. 4 Get to know the staff [BL] This is an empty staff: it contains two bars, with each bar containing five thin lines. Depending on the type of instruments, you may have three, four, or even more bars, with each bar having multiple thin lines. But for piano staff, it is always like the one above: two bars, with 4 thin lines in each bar. Notes are drawn on the bars, and the thin lines are used to destinguish between different notes. The top bar shows notes with higer tones (treble) which you play with your right hand,and the lower bar shows those with lower tones (bass) which you play with you left hand. [BS] [N] As shown in the graph above, notes are drawn on the lines or between the lines. [NO] If it's a sharp note such as "C#", put a "#" sign before the note. Similarly, if it's a flat note such as "Db", put a "b" sign before the note. [WI] The position of a note with respect to the lines shows you what to play, is it C or F? is it a shart or flat. However, in order to play music, you also need to know when to play it and how long you play a note. In order to show when to play a note, a staff is separated into measures. How long you play a note is defined by the solidness of the note head (the note that we talked about just now) and shape of the tail. As shown in the graph below, a note with a circle-head and no tail is a whole note a note with a circle-head and a tail but no spurs on tail is a half note a note with a solid-head and a tail with no spurs is a quarter note a note with a solid-head and a tail with one spur is an eighth note a note with a solid-head and a tail with two spurs is a sixteenth note [HF] Also note that the 4/4 at the beginning of each bar shows that each measure is composed of 4 quarter notes (4*1/4). If the numbers are 4/8, then each measure is composed by 4 eighth notes. (4*1/8) [N16] Sometimes you'll notice that some notes are connected together by a "beam" as shown in the following graph. These beams are only used to tie notes for the same beat together, nothing else. 5 How to use your hands and body 5.1 Correct body position[D] [D] sit near the center of the piano (the middle C key) the distance between you and the piano: make sure that when you fully stretch your arm, you can just reach the staff. the height of you hand: if you put your hands on the keyboard, your forearm has to be level. you feet should stand firm on the floor or a piano stand 5.2 Correct arm position[D] [D] If your elbows press against your body, your small finger (5th) will falter while playing. Imagine your arms as your wings. Also, you hand, wrist, and forearm must form a straight line and remain level while playing. (Recall the correct way to use a computer keyboard). 5.3 Correct hand position [D] [D] [D] [LP] Position your hand as if you are holding a 2-in radius ball. For beginners, try to put your hands closer to the black keys because beginners tend to play the closer end of the white keys. Try to touch the tip of a pencil with the tip of you finger, this is also the part of your finger you use to play piano. As shown in the figure above: play C with your thumb, then the next four white keys with the other five fingers. Use your right hand to play keys on the right side of middle C, left hand to play those on the left side of middle C. 6 Tutorials PianoNanny Comments References [BL] http://www.blanksheetmusic.net/images/piano_sample.gif [BS] http://www.blanksheetmusic.net/ [D] http://www.doremifasoft.com/frpiinandex.html [HF] http://www.musictheory.halifax.ns.ca/images/note_relationships.GIF [LP] http://www.learnpianoonline.com/lesson1/cposition.gif [N16] http://www.pianonanny.com/16.html [NO] http://www.northern.edu/wieland/piano/ma/d_flat.gif [S] http://www.smu.edu/totw/keybrd2.gif [WI] http://users.wireweb.net/green/patt41.gif