Piano for Beginners 6th ED - 2016 UK

Playing the piano

S

o far, we have only played one note per

hand, but the polyphonic nature of the

piano means that we can play up ten notes

at the same time. This is very rare, however,

and most of the time you will be playing two, three

or sometimes four notes with the same hand. We’ll

be talking about playing three and four notes at the

same time in the chord walkthroughs, but for now

let’s look at playing two notes together and how the

intervals between them will affect your sound.

In music theory terms, an interval is the difference

between two notes (not necessarily played at

the same time), and they are often measured in

semitones. A semitone is the interval between two

adjacent keys on the keyboard, and two of these

semitones make up a tone. So, there is a semitone

between C and C#, but a tone between C and

D. But rather than just naming intervals after the

number of semitones between the notes, they are

all called different names, which you can see in the

table to the right.

In this tutorial we will take a basic melody and

slowly add a harmony to it, identifying different

intervals in the process.

Learn about

intervals

Take the next step and play more than one note at

the same time on the same hand

Interval Distance

Minor third 3 semitones

Major third 4 semitones

Perfect fourth 5 semitones

Tritone 6 semitones

Perfect fifth 7 semitones

Minor sixth 8 semitones

Major sixth 9 semitones

Perfect octave 12 semitones

Create a tune with intervals

See how different intervals affect a right-hand melody

02 Add a harmony

Now you’ve got a melody sorted, add a harmony to it. All our additional notes

are three or four semitones below the original melody, but you can experiment

with other intervals. We’d advise sticking to only the white keys at this point.

01 Make your melody

First of all, write a short but catchy melody of no more than two bars. We

recommend sticking with C major as it’s easier to experiment as you can play

around with only the white keys.

Audio file

Listen to the audio files

and follow along on your

own keyboard

Give it a try