Piano Parts

Series Summary

The piano is easily one of the most recognizable musical instruments in the world. Since the early 18th century, musicians have used the piano to compose a myriad of musical compositions. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Haydn all created sublime masterpieces for the piano. Creating music on the piano is a challenging and rewarding endeavor, given the incredible octave range of the piano and dynamic adjustment.

In this free video series our professional musician Athena Reich will show you several steps for accompanying yourself on piano. You'll begin by learning about the notes and parts of the piano. Athena will then show you several methods for understanding those notes in relation to one another. You'll learn whole and half steps, intervals, major and minor chords as well as chord variations. She'll then teach you how to start being creative and experiment with extensions, inversions and different musical arrangements. In the end you'll be playing with a wide array of knowledge that will help you accompany any solo artist.

Video Transcript

"In this first clip on "How to Accompany Yourself on Piano", I'm going to teach you the parts of the piano. So come on over here and we've got the keys. These are the white keys, these are the black keys. And you can see the black keys are arranged in groups of three, two, three, two, three, two, like that, and that's the way that you can orient yourself on the piano. We're going to talk about that a little bit later. Down here we've got the pedals. This right pedal is the sustained pedal, and when I play the piano, if I hit a key and take my hand off, it stills sustains the note and will play that note, keep that, have it in a nice long tone. If I play the left pedal, it makes it softer, nice and softer. So here's the keys and we have the black keys and the white keys, and you find two black keys right on the left of the two black keys is "Middle C". "Middle C" is your best friend, that's the note that you can start orienting yourself. And up here we've got the high notes, down here the low notes. So if we go up in the alphabet, if this is C, then the next key would be D, and E, F, G, and we start over again on A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, D, E, F, G. So those are the notes of the alphabet, and the preliminaries of the basics of the piano."