3 Skills You Need BEFORE You Can Play Piano

Many times, students believe that learning the piano starts right when they sit down at the keyboard and learn what the names of the notes and keys are and start to play.

Actually, there are several things that you can and need to learn before you even start trying to play the piano.
Think of when a baby first starts to talk. She doesn’t start with sentences and long paragraphs…she starts with just one word, and then two, and adds on as she learns by listening to her parents.

Before we can play sitting at the piano, we too need to learn the “words” before we can start putting them together. Let’s translate this into piano playing and see exactly what these things are that we need before we get to the piano.

First – we need to learn the musical alphabet. As in language, we need to learn what the letters are before we can put them together to make words.

• The musical alphabet is – A, B, C, D, E, F, & G. Seven letters…that’s it! Isn’t it amazing that all music comes from just seven notes? Now, there are variations of each note, several ones, so we end up with a larger range of notes, but they still all come from these seven notes.
• Once you get to G, you don’t keep going like you do in the regular alphabet, you simply go back to A, and keep repeating.

Second – is the layout of the keyboard. There’s a neat pattern to the keyboard in terms of the keys. You’ll notice that there are black keys and white keys.

• The black keys follow a pattern of 2 black keys, then 3 black keys – all the way up the keyboard. This is extremely helpful when you learn what notes you have in a piece and then identify them on the keyboard according to the key patterns. (I’ll show you how to do this in the video at the end).
• If you sit down on your piano bench in the very middle of your keyboard, identify the 2 black keys right in front of you. Then, from the black key on the left move down to the white key right next to it. This is middle C.
• Move up to the next 2 black keys and move down again from the one on the left and you’ll find C again, only it is the C above middle C. This pattern follows all the way up and down the keyboard. See how it helps in identifying your notes on the whole keyboard? (I’ll show you more notes using this same pattern identification method in the video at the end).

Third – we need to learn our finger numbers. In piano playing we will find fingerings over notes in our music that are telling us what finger to use to play that note or chord. We need to know how to “count” our fingers in musical language.

• Each of our hands has 5 fingers so starting with our thumbs, we count that as 1, the index finger is 2, the middle finger is 3, the ring finger is 4, and the pinky is 5. The only numbers we use in finger counting are 1-5.
• When a piece tells you to put your 1st finger on middle C, you put your thumb down on the key of middle C.
• This finger pattern follows in each hand…think of them as a mirror to each other. The first finger will always be your thumb, as well as all the other fingerings listed above.

​The following video gives you visual examples of each of these as well as a practice session with me in finding middle C, different fingers on different notes on the keyboard, and other things to help make sure you really grasp all of these things before you start practicing on them on your own. 

If you like my tips and lessons, you will love the courses over on my website. Whether you are a beginner looking to get a solid foundation to build on or you are looking to take your existing skills to that next level, the online music courses on my website https://www.pianolessonsontheweb.com will help you do just that.