Music Theory For Piano- The Beginnerʼs Guide

*This article will be a lot to take in if youʼre an absolute theory novice. Go slow and take your time. You might not understand everything perfectly right from the get go, so consider short breaks or repeated readings.*

Take learning the key of CMajor for example (CDEFGAB): From C through to B you can instantly get a clear birds eye view of the scale from above. With this, you are able to play through each of its 7 degrees, memorise its notes and the 7 chords it contains.

Right off the bat you can get a more complete idea of how all of these musical concepts fit together. Hereʼs what I mean:

Above is a quick breakdown the key of C Major, including all 12 tones, and some examples of things you can start to learn.

You can see that C is numbered as the first white key, going alphabetically through to B and then repeating.

Similarly, the black keys are numbered like this too. They display each of the sharp/ flat notes on the keyboard, starting with C#/ Db and ending with A#/Bb before repeating.

Playing each of the white and black keys in linear chromatic order creates a 12 tone scale, with 7 white keys and 5 black.

There are only 12 individual tones found in western music. This might not seem like a lot, but the deeper you go, the more varieties you get. Weʼre going to ignore the black keys after this point, as CMajor has no sharp/ flat notes. It is often the first key we learn for this very reason. The ‘uncomplicatedʼ or ‘vanillaʼ key.

Iʼve arranged it starting from the the tonic chord (tonic being the main chord in a key) of CMajor (Red), and outlined the 3 notes it contains.

Also included are the notes of CMajorʼs relative Minor scale (Aminor) with the order of itʼs own chords and notes in itʼs tonic chord (Amin) (Yellow).

If it seems confusing, thatʼs because it will be at first, remember this: CMajor and Aminor are one and the same scale and contain the same chords. They are really just the same sequence 7 notes starting on a different root note. The first on C, the second on A.

CDEFGAB

ABCDEFG

Like that.

Exercise

Start with the Chord of CMajor, and move that same shape along the keys, starting with the next root note each time. Begin with Cmaj (C E G).

Now move along to Dmin (D F A) by skipping over one note at a time. Repeat this process and you will play each chord in the key in sequence, starting with Cmaj (1) and ending with Bdim (7).

Lastly, Iʼve numbered the order of chords along the top and bottom: CMajorʼs 1-7 below, and Aminorʼs 1-7 above.

They revert back to 1 at the octave. Iʼve also included the order of Tones (T) and Semitones (S) beside the numbers. These can be thought of as the size of the jumps between each note, with a Tone being 2, and a Semitone being 1.

Take some time to soak it all in. If youʼre finding all this theory a bit much, feel free to double back to one of my theory articles where I explain chords 1-7 and how chords and keys work in a bit more depth. I know itʼs a lot to learn, just try to stick with it for now.

Thatʼs it for now. Stay tuned and Iʼll have some more technique and theory articles ready to go soon enough!