Before any playing: where things are. The keyboard repeats the same twelve-key pattern from bottom to top, and the black keys are the landmarks. This section covers finding notes, naming them, counting distances, and how the keyboard compares with guitar frets and Push pads.
Start this section in the interactive courseEach section is a set of short lessons with exercises that check your playing. An exercise ticks off when you pass it; the section is done when every exercise is ticked.
Most exercises light the keys to start with, then fewer of them, then none. That fading is deliberate: the aim is to play without looking anything up.
Exercises with a backing track have a tempo slider. Learn them slowly, then bring them up: they tick off at 85% of the set tempo or faster.
A good session is 15 to 20 minutes: two minutes of a drill (key flash or note names), the next exercise or two in your current section, then five minutes in the jam room in the key of whatever you’re working on. Daily short sessions do far more than one long one a week.
Move on when a section is ticked off, but keep going back to the drills in sections 4 and 5. Key fluency fades without use and comes back quickly with it.
The black keys come in groups of two and three, all the way along. Use those groups to find notes instead of counting from the end.
C is the white key just left of each group of two. F is the white key just left of each group of three.
Every C is the same note at a different height. The one nearest the middle of the keyboard is middle C.
The white keys are named A to G, then the names start again. From C up: C D E F G A B, then C.
A black key takes its name from a neighbour. The one above C is C sharp (C♯), which is also D flat (D♭). Sharp means a semitone up, flat a semitone down. Which name is used depends on the key; sections 4 and 5 explain why.
E to F and B to C have no black key between them. Those are the only places where two white keys are a semitone apart.
An octave is twelve keys up: the same letter, higher. Notes are numbered by octave, so A3 and A4 are an octave apart. This course calls middle C C4.
Ableton Live numbers octaves one lower: middle C shows as C3 in Live. Same key, different label.
Octave buttons on a small keyboard shift everything by twelve keys. Exercises here accept any octave unless they say otherwise.
A semitone is the distance between two neighbouring keys, black or white. It’s one fret on a guitar. A whole tone is two semitones.
This course measures distances in semitones: a minor third is 3, a major third 4, a fourth 5, a fifth 7, an octave 12.
Count keys, not white keys: the black ones are part of the count.
On guitar each fret is a semitone, and each string is five semitones above the one below, except G to B, which is four.
Push 2’s chromatic layout with rows in fourths works the same way without the exception: one pad right is a semitone up, one pad up is five semitones.
Keys have no layout to learn: every note is in one line, and the black keys show where you are. The catch is that a chord or scale looks different in each key, which is what sections 4 to 7 deal with.