Brief Background of Keyboard Instrument:
A keyboard instrument is a musical instrument played using a row of levers which are pressed by the fingers. The earliest known keyboard instrument was the Ancient Greek, a type of pipe organ, invented in the third century BC. From its invention until the fourteenth century, the organ remained the only keyboard instrument. Almost every keyboard until the fifteenth century had seven naturals to each octave. Hence, in a phrase such as Mozart excelled as a keyboard player, the word keyboard is typically all-inclusive. The keys were likely balanced and could be played with a light touch. The piano was revolutionary one because a Pianist could vary the volume of the sound by varying the vigour with which each key was struck. In its current form, the piano is a product of the late nineteenth century, and is far removed in both sound and appearance from the Pianos known to Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven. Electronic Keyboard instruments were further developed in the early twentieth century and went to replace heavy keyboards for its versatility in sound and beat combination as they can be easily transported.
The most common of these keyboard instruments are the piano, organ, and various electronic keyboards, including synthesizers and digital pianos. Today, the term keyboard often refers to keyboard-style synthesizers. Under the fingers of a sensitive performer, the keyboard may also be used to control dynamics, phrasing, shading, articulation, and other elements of expression—depending on the design and inherent capabilities of the instrument.
Modern keyboards:
Much effort has gone into creating an instrument that sounds like the piano but lacks its size and weight. The electric piano and electronic piano were early efforts that, while useful instruments in their own right, did not convincingly reproduce the timbre of the piano. Electric and electronic organs were developed during the same period. More recent electronic keyboard designs strive to emulate the sound of specific make and model pianos using digital samples and computer models.
LEARN TO PLAY THE KEYBOARD
There are many people who want to learn to play the keyboard but find the prospect very daunting. With so many keys to memorise and intricate handwork needed to play music, learning to play the keyboard is often viewed as a very difficult task, which is why so many avoid trying to learn. All it really takes is hard-work, time and dedication. Plus, once you learn the basics, it becomes so much easier to play more advanced notes and chords on a keyboard. In fact, learning to play the keyboard provides a fantastic foundation for other musical instruments. The fundamentals of playing the keyboard serve you well when trying to play other instruments, making it a great first-time instrument for children and adults alike. The below guide aims to give you all the information you need to learn the basics of playing keyboard. A big question that beginners have before they start is whether it is better to learn to play on a keyboard or piano. It is often thought that the keyboard is vastly different from an acoustic piano, but the two are very similar, and it could even be argued that a keyboard is better to learn and even the maintenance is less in keyboard. Keyboard is completely digital and hence it does not need tuning and has a versatility of various tones to play effectively. An acoustic piano is a very expensive instrument, large and bulky, hence it is not worth paying so much.
Everything you need to know to start:
The most obvious thing you need is a keyboard. However, bear in mind that there are various types of keyboards available, including digital pianos, which blends together aspects of an acoustic piano (such as weighted keys) and a keyboard (such as various sounds). A basic keyboard should be more than enough for any beginners, with anything that has 49, 61, or 76 keys a suitable choice. Digital pianos come with a fully 88-key keyboard, which offers the best range, but these are not necessary until you become better versed with playing. Another essential item to go along with the keyboard is a good keyboard bench. Using a bench to play a keyboard ensures correct posture to avoid any strains. It also allows for better, more fluid movements as you play along the length of the keyboard. While chairs make for a good substitute, they do limit movement when playing, but a keyboard bench is relatively cheap to buy. Finally, headphones are a great idea when learning to play the keyboard. Not only does it avoid you disturbing others when practising to learn the keyboard, but also allows you to focus entirely on the practicing, making the entire process easier.
How to Position your body:
One of the most important basics of learning the keyboard is your positioning. You want to be sitting at the centre of the keyboard, preferably on a keyboard bench, as they are designed to make you sit with the proper posture for playing.
Sit on the bench with your feet placed below the keyboard and keep the soles firmly on the ground. Do not place your legs to far below the keyboard – only have a small part of your knees sitting below the keyboard.
Practice sitting in this position, and pay close attention to your posture, and the distance you are from the keyboard. Better posture means better playing, so it is good to get to grips with this as early as possible.
You want a straight back, relaxed shoulders, and feet placed on the ground at all times when playing.
Before placing anything on the keys, relax your arms and hands, resting them at your side for a moment. Let your hands naturally form a C shape with your fingers slightly curved, then place them somewhere in the middle on the white keys – make sure your elbows are sitting at the same height as the keyboard.
Understanding the white Keys:
The white keys on a keyboard are whole notes. While many assume there’s dozens of different notes on a keyboard, it’s just seven natural notes in the same sequence played at different octaves across the keyboard – the exact same as you find on a piano too.
As whole notes, the white keys do not have any sharps or flats, just the natural notes of the musical alphabet, which are A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. After a G note, it goes back to C and the alphabet starts over again.
Finding Notes:
A sign used in musical notation to represent the relative duration, pitch of a sound and pitch class. Musical term note/tone in music describes the pitch and the duration of a musical sound. The first seven letters of the alphabet by which notes/tones that are distinguished C,D,E,F,G,A,B and they form a scale.
Because the A note is the beginning of the musical alphabet, it is worth familiarising with its location on the keyboard. This is quite simple, as the A note is always found nearby a group of three black keys.
To locate the A note, we should check for a group of three black keys anywhere on the keyboard. You will find A is the white key found between the second and third black key of any three black keys on a keyboard.
After finding A, you then know that the following keys play out the remainder of the musical alphabet – B, C, D, E, F, and G. A good way to remember the notes is to find C note which is below the 2 black keys and then mark each of the notes on the white keys. Remember, there are only seven different notes to remember across the keyboard, so try to familiarise them.
Finding the C Note
One of the most important notes worth finding and memorising is the C note. As a central note, learning where C is on a keyboard is one of the easiest ways to quickly understand the positioning of all the notes. This is simple to do, as you just need to locate any grouping of two black keys, and then look for the white key on the left side of the first black key – this is always a C. Every note after this is a consequence of C, and every C note on the keyboard is an octave, meaning they are always eight notes apart. So, if you learn how to find a C anywhere on the keyboard, you should find it much easier to identify and play other notes from here.
Finding the F Note
Another note worth remembering is the F note. Much like C, this is a very important note when playing keyboard, so being able to find it quickly and naturally will always benefit your learning process. F is quite easy to find, being the first white key before three black keys. So, try finding each of the F notes on the keyboard, just like with A and C, focusing more so on C and F. Again, it helps to mark the notes on the keys when first learning the keyboard, as you will find the location of each note quickly and without fuss.
Practicing Notes:
While you need not learn how to read piano music any time soon, it does help to know the differences of each notation, as this will make learning to read the music easier once you progress further. On sheet music, there are different notes for whole notes, half notes, and quarter notes. They look quite different, so it is not too hard to understand what each one represents.
How music is written?
Western written music is a language that has been developing for thousands of years, and even the music we read today has been around for over 300 years. Music notation is the representation of sound with symbols, from basic notations for pitch, duration, and timing. Here we introduce you to the basics of reading music, show you some more advanced methods, and suggest some ways to gain more knowledge about the subject. Music notation or musical notation is any system used to visually represent perceived music played with instruments or sung by the human voice through the use of written, printed, or otherwise-produced symbols, including notation for durations of absence of sound such as rests. Many systems have been used in the past to write music. Today most musicians in the Western world write musical notes on a Staff, five parallel lines with four spaces in between them.
Staff:
The Staff is an arrangement of five parallel lines, and the spaces between them. Both lines and spaces are numbered for reference purposes, and are always counted from lowest (bottom of the staff) to highest (top of the staff).
Clef:
Clef is signs placed in the beginning of staff which enables one to determine the name and pitch of any note.
Treble clef is one of the first things we will encounter when reading music. This sign, which looks like a big, fancy cursive symbol at the left end of the staff, is the legend that tells you approximately what range your instrument will play in. All instruments and voices in the higher ranges use the treble clef. The treble clef, or G clef, is derived from an ornamental Latin letter G. One good way to remember this is that the line at the centre of the clef's "swirl" wraps around the line that represents the note G. The name "F clef" derives from its origins as the Gothic letter F. The two dots on the clef lie above and below the "F" line on the staff. The staff of the bass clef represents different notes than that of the treble clef.
Grand Staff:
The grand staff or “great stave” as it is called, is a combination of two staves put together, usually a treble clef and a bass clef. This combination clef is used for a variety of instruments, including piano, organ, marimba, harp, and more. Typically, the upper staff uses a treble clef and the lower staff has a bass clef. Combination of the treble and brass connected with one a line on the left side of the clef.
Ledger Lines:
The staff is written as five horizontal parallel lines. Most of the notes of the music are placed on one of these lines or in a space in between lines. Extra ledger lines may be added to show a note that is too high or too low to be on the staff. Vertical bar lines divide the staff into short sections called measures or bars.
Sharp and Flat:
More specifically, in musical notation, sharp means "higher in pitch by one semitone (half step)". Sharp is the opposite of flat, which is a lowering of pitch. A sharp looks like a hash tag (♯) and a flat looks like a lowercase B (♭). They are placed to the left of a note head and indicate that the note to follow is played a half-step higher (for a sharp), or a half-step lower (for a flat).
Scales in Music:
Scale in music theory, is any set of musical notes ordered by fundamental frequency or pitch. A scale ordered by increasing pitch is an ascending scale, and a scale ordered by decreasing pitch is a descending scale. Some scales contain different pitches when ascending than when descending, for example, the melodic minor scale. Basically there two types of scales called Major and Minor scale.
Steps of Major and Minor Scale:
Scale in music theory, is any set of musical notes ordered by fundamental frequency or pitch. A scale ordered by increasing pitch is an ascending scale, and a scale ordered by decreasing pitch is a descending scale. Some scales contain different pitches when ascending than when descending, for example, the melodic minor scale. Hence there are two types of scales.
Scale formation:
A scale is a series of steps between two fixed musical points. These two fixed points are always the same note, but in different octaves. We call these points as root notes. How we get from the lower root note to the higher root note is called ‘a scale’ which has seven notes. Hence it is a linear sequence of notes that starts on a tonic note and ends on the same note one or more octaves higher than the start note. Scales are often played ascending then descending in one phrase without repeating the uppermost tonic note. Scales are an important topic to be familiar with for all levels of guitar players. Being able to play scales is an excellent ability to have, whether for warming up before playing or to incorporate it into a solo.
Scales in music theory will be generally the same no matter what instrument you play. There is, of course, a difference in how you play it across different instruments. What a scale in music consists of is a series of notes ordered by pitch, all within one octave. The major scale is the most common of all scales. We have 3 types of minor scales (Harmonic, Melodic & Natural minor scales). The pentatonic scale is one made up of 5 notes.
Guide to Piano Finger Placement
Learn to keep your finger position on the Piano keyboard. The graphic below illustrates the piano fingering number system. As can be seen, the thumb is the first finger of each hand.
It is very important to learn finger numbers because as part of your beginner piano lessons, you have to learn the proper fingering for scales, chords, arpeggios and musical passages. By using the correct fingers for the correct keys, playing the piano will be easier. You will be able to execute new techniques, master awkward positions, and exercise speed and flexibility. It is important to get this right from the start. There are too many piano players struggling with their playing because they use the wrong fingers for particular keys.
Exercise: Right hand finger movement: 123, 123, 45; 12312345;
Note, Rest and Beat value:
Note value indicates the relative duration of a note using the color or shape of the note head, the presence or absence of a stem, and the presence or absence of flags/beams/hooks/tails. A rest indicates a silence of an equivalent duration. All notes have length. However, the number of beats they get depends on the time signature so only relative note durations will be discussed here.
1 = Whole Note (Semibreve) = 4 beats
2 = Half Note (Minim) = 2 beats
3 = Quarter Note (Crotchet) = 1 beat
4 = Eighth Note (Quaver) = ½ beat
5 = Sixteenth note (Semiquaver) = ¼ beat
Doted Note:
In Western musical notation, a dotted note is a note with a small dot written after it. In modern practice, the first dot increases the duration of the basic note by half of its original value.
Understanding Beat in Music:
In music and music theory, the beat is the basic unit of time, the pulse of the beat level. Recognizing the beat in a song means finding the pattern and speed of the music. If you know how to recognize the beat, you can control all of the other elements of the music.
Defining Meter:
A measure is a musical phrase which contains a specified number of beats. Meter is the regularly recurring grouping of beats into measures. Measures, in Western notation, are separated by bar lines. A time or meter signature at the beginning of every piece of music, and sometimes within a piece of music, provides information about how many beats are in a measure. They consist of two numbers, one over the other. The top number indicates the number of beats in a measure, while the bottom number indicates the value of the beat. It is important to remember that beats are not the same thing as notes.
While there are, in theory, quite a few possible meters, only a few are commonly used in classical or even contemporary music. 2/4, 3/4, 4/4, and 6/8 meter are among the most popular across genres.
2/4 Meter: Also known as march time, 2/4 meter is used in a great many patriotic and defence music pieces. It simply means that there are two beats to a measure, and each beat takes the amount of time required for a quarter note. It means that there will be 1 2 counts in each bar on the staff.
3/4 Meter: Used mostly in classical and waltz music, 3/4 pieces played in and have three quarter-note beats in a measure. It means that there are three beats to a measure counted as - 1 2 3. In 3/4 meter the accent is usually on the first beat.
4/4 Meter: Also known as common time, 4/4 meter is used in a great many classical pieces. It simply means that there are four beats to a measure, and each beat takes the amount of time required for a quarter note. It means that there will be 1 2 3 4 counts in each bar on the staff.
6/8 Meter: this beat is an example of compound meter. Mostly used in classical music, 6/8 meter includes 6 beats in a measure. In this type of meter, the eighth notes are commonly used. For example, 6 eighth notes in a measure will have the count - 1 2 3 4 5 6. Here the accent is on the first and fourth beats.
What are Bars in Music:
Bar is Vertical lines placed on the staff. Between two bars we have measures. Double Bar is two vertical lines on the staff. A bar or measure is used in writing music. It is a way of organizing the written music in small sections. Each bar is a small amount of time. Most music has a regular beat (or pulse) which can be felt. Each bar usually has the same number of beats in it.
Ties & Slur:
Slur is a curved line joining two or more notes of different pitch. Ties are a curved line joining of the same pitch.
Understanding the C Major Scale:
When the notes C, D, E, F, G, A, B and C of next octave are played in that specific sequence, the notes form the C Major scale. Keyboard scales are basically notes that are grouped and played together, with the C Major Scale being one of the most widely used on the keyboard. It is also called the pure scale which does not have any sharp or flat notes. For this reason, it is worth practicing playing the C Major scale to familiarise yourself with keyboard scales, as learning C Major scale allows you to play chords, melodies, and arpeggios. Simply start on the C note and then play each of the subsequent key to the right, pressing each note once before moving onto the next. Once you reach B, the seventh key from C, you’ve played the C Major scale. It will take time to get a good flow going, so don’t be deterred if making lots of mistakes to begin with – practice makes perfect.
How Scales built:
This is an incredibly tough question and to be honest there is no definitive answer. You would think that because there are twelve different notes (7 full notes + 5 semi notes), there might be twelve different scales; but things are a bit more complicated. We have Major Scales and Minor scales that need to be considered.
While it is true that there are twelve different notes and twelve different major scales, you also have to consider minor scales. With minor scales you have two forms of each scale, the harmonic and the melodic, so you now have 36 scales. Here we do not consider the modes. This becomes a little tricky because modes are scales that simply start on different notes.
Flow of Scales and its Key Signatures
Understanding Chords in Music:
Chords are two or more harmonic notes played at the same time. Most basic chords are built using three notes called triads. Chords are built on their root note (the starting note). The rest of the notes in a chord are determined by the chord quality. Basically Triads which are built on first, third and fifth note are Major chords, Minor chords, Diminished chord and Augmented chords which make the sound more melodious to the ears. However there are many other types of chord which can be learnt at the later stage. Some chords are quite easy to learn, so it might be
worth practicing them, so you know what to expect from chords in the future. Being a basic three note chord, the C chord is possibly the easiest cord to play on a keyboard, so is a good place to start.
Using the Musical Keyboard our main focus is to how to play the simplest of chords on a keyboard while showing how to obtain them with some small amount of understanding on single scale.
Conclusion:
When learning any instrument, you get exactly what you put in, so the more time dedicated to practicing the basics, the better the player you become. Even just playing for 30 minutes each day makes a huge difference in your development, so be ready to put the time in. Practice every aspect that has been laid out in this guide, working especially on the parts you struggle with. A good place to begin is to memorise the location of notes on the white keys. It may take a little time, but once you start to remember them more naturally, you will start to find everything much easier. After this, start working on the more complex techniques, such as playing scales and chords. The most important part of music theory for a keyboard is reading sheet music. Now, this seems incredibly daunting at first, but it gets much easier once you have a rough idea of the basics, which you should already know. Check online for free keyboard sheet music, watch videos and read articles explaining how to read the songbooks, and try practising some classic beginner songs to get a better understanding of musical notation.
Good Tips:
Practice playing the keyboard every day. Try to find at least 30 minutes a day to practice and build on your skills.
Practice reading sheet music. Once you have understood the basics, you can start practicing actual songs on the keyboard.
Understand the flow of beats. Try to feel them in your heart. The beat is the basic unit of time and the pulse.
Understand the Chord very well which bring harmony. The quality and type of chards should be well understood may it be a major, minor, diminished, augmented triads or seventh.
Try writing your own songs. Once you understand how notes, scales, chords, and musical notation work, you can start to experiment with different sound settings on your keyboard.
Ready Reference:
Simple Exercises to play on the Keyboard:
Finger practice:
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