How to Pair Piano Keyboard and Pentagram

⚠️ Warning To follow this guide you must have an 88-key weighted digital keyboard or an 88-key piano. In order not to repeat a thousand times during the article "88-key weighted digital keyboard or 88-key piano", we will refer to both indifferently with the term piano keyboard.

Introduction

If you do not have a piano keyboard, it would be better if you bought a valid one immediately to start your work of association with the pentagram. It should be a branded and recognized product on the market, so you can have assistance if it should fail or should give you any problem: in the case of a digital piano keyboard, the rule is that the more you spend the less you spend. Of course, if you have just started you will not want a top of the range: for this reason we want to give you a suggestion for the perfect balance between portfolios and product quality. Our suggestion is the Yamaha P45b.

When you finally have your piano keyboard, you will have to start relating the names of the notes placed on the sheet music with the names of the notes associated with the white keys.

Only after making this association you can relate the score to the piano keyboard.This last type of association can become fluent only in the practice of technique to the instrument, that is, in the time spent reading, studying in a conscious and reasoned way the music on the piano. The reader will be introduced to the in-depth study of the technique in subsequent articles. 

Where to start?

The starting point for the association process are always the two musical keys of the double pentagram. The violin key, in fact, indicates that on the second line of the pentagram there is a precise G key and no other, that is the one that on the piano keyboard corresponds to the fourth that is encountered starting from the left on a piano keyboard:

The bass key, which is located on the fourth line of the pentagram, indicates instead the third fa that meets counting from the left on a piano keyboard. 

Do the Two Keys Really Read Differently?

We can observe that although we commonly think that the keys must be read differently from each other, in reality in the process of reading they touch and cross continuously as if one continued the speech of the other: from a tactile point of view on the piano keyboard we meet without interruption notes ranging from the bass key to the violin key, and from a visual point of view on the double pentagram, as we have already seen in a previous article, when we switch from the violin key to the bass key or vice versa there is no real moment when we stop reading the notes in one way and start doing it in another. This was seen even more clearly when the note names were associated with precise positions on the score: all notable names written in a violin key can also be written in bass key and vice versa, using additional cuts.

Conclusions

That point where the C of the bass key meets the C of the violin key is called central C, not because of its position in the piano keyboard but because it is located in the center of the extension of the two keys of violin and bass.

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This new awareness allows you to interpret the two keys in continuity. You just have to use the colors to find all the meeting points between the two keys on your piano keyboard!

Extra

Since as we have seen the keys used for piano writing are two and indicate two different points of the keyboard, the misconception may arise that the right hand is reserved for the violin key while the left hand for the bass one. In the next articles you will find out why this conception is wrong. If you can't wait, you can continue working on your true musical goals by reading our Piano Reading Method manual for free!