Piano Key Chart

An easy piano notes chart to understand the piano key layout

I've also included a couple of piano video lessons, so you can listen as you learn. This one covers the piano key layout and how to find two of the letters in the musical alphabet, C and B:

This one puts together all the letters of the music alphabet in sequence:

The piano keyboard chart below will greatly help your understanding of the piano key layout.

Each key on the piano has a letter name (ie the musical alphabet). We'll take a look at the white keys only to keep things simple.

The ‘musical alphabet’ is basically the same as the alphabet you already know, but it’s easier – you only have to remember the first 7 letters (A B C D E F G).

Now, let's think back to our previous lesson, where we talked about the layout of the piano key notes - where the black keys on the piano were grouped in patterns of twos and threes.

Let’s now take a closer look at the white keys that fit around the 2 and 3 black-key groups, using this piano notes chart.

So if you look at the C key, you'll see that it sits just to the left of the 2 black group keys.

Remember how the pattern of the piano notes repeats itself over and over again? If you take a look at your piano keyboard, you’ll see that there are lots of Cs (maybe around 7). Here is an example to show you the pattern.

As you can see, the musical alphabet repeats itself over and over again.

How To Use This Piano Keyboard Chart

So, one of the first steps in learning how to play piano is to ‘memorise’ which letter of the music alphabet belongs to which white note.

The best way to do this is to sit down at your piano once a day, pick a random letter and then see how quickly you can play the correct key on the piano. Then, try and play several of the same letter names at once (eg play 3 Ds) (without looking at the piano key chart, of course!). In my piano teacher lingo...I call these 'piano drills'!. They are very effective.