J. Anthony Allen shows why the piano keyboard is the best tool for learning music theory: every pitch is laid out in a straight line. He walks through opening the virtual keyboard in MuseScore and explains that white and black keys each produce different pitches. The next lessons cover what the white keys are called and how they relate to each other.
Okay, up next, let's talk about the piano keyboard. Now, we use the piano keyboard in theory because it's probably the most just kind of ubiquitous instrument around. And the other reason we like it is that we can see all the notes. You know, if we were using something like a clarinet to talk about music theory, you can't see the notes on a clarinet. You know, you have to put in combinations of fingers to get each note. But on a piano keyboard, we can see, you know, this note and then this note and then this note. So it works out quite well for music theory. So in any music theory course, you're always focusing on the piano keyboard kind of as the template to see the notes. So here in Musescore, you can actually pull up a piano keyboard if you go to where is it View piano keyboard. Or you can just press P, and that pulls up this, right? And it's cool because I can play it right? And it's neat. Okay, so here's our piano keyboard. So what we're gonna do in this section is we're gonna talk about how this thing works, right? And then the next section, we're gonna talk about how this thing relates to this stuff, right? Where these come together. On the piano keyboard, we have two different kinds of keys. We have white keys. Those are these ones. They are the color white. And we have black keys. These ones. Oops. These ones, right? So white keys and black keys. Now, they all produce notes, right? But they work a little differently by. In terms of what we call them, they get different names, and it can be a little confusing. So let's go through the white notes first and how they work and how the intervals work on a keyboard. And then we'll look at the black keys. So let's jump into the white keys on the keyboard.
