Theory Thursday: The Piano
Theory Thursday
by Jason Steele
Welcome to Theory Thursday! Some would argue, “what’s so fun about music theory?”… I would argue back, “what’s NOT fun about music theory?”
No matter what side you live on I’ll be posting an ongoing series of music theory lessons. If you want to grow as a musician it unavoidable that you must have some sort of idea about how music works. I’ll start with the basics while also trying to keep it always tied to basic concepts. I don’t want to go too far too fast. I’ll also be posting some tune analysis down the line, so if you have a song request you’d like me to pull apart and teach you about what’s going on, just post your requests in the comments below. Happy Theory Thursday Ya’ll!
The Piano
The first step you need to take is to become familiar with what the names of all of the notes are, and to do this we will start by taking a look at the piano diagram below. You might ask here, “I play guitar, why are you showing me a piano?”. I teach this first concept on piano because the piano is so visual which makes it easier to see all of the notes and their relationships. In fact you may have already noticed that the piano has 2 different groups of black keys. From left to right it has a group of 2, then a group of 3, group of 2, group of 3, 2, 3,2, 3, etc.
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