Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0328: Memorizing piano keys for beginning keyboard players

Episode Date: June 10, 2015

Jacob is a beginning pianist and asks about memorizing the note names of piano keys. I present some mnemonics for accomplishing this quickly and easily. What do you want to learn? Leave your question at http://MasterOfMemory.com/. Music credit: Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet, 2nd movement, performed by the US Army Band.

Master of Memory 328. Welcome to Master of Memory. I'm Timothy, and I'm here to answer your accelerated learning questions every day and to inspire and empower you to learn anything you want to learn faster than ever. Jacob submitted a written question at masterofmemory.com slash question. Jacob says, I'm a college student and a big fan of your Ace Productivity podcast. I was wondering how can I memorize the keys of the piano with the notes the keys make? Well, Jacob, one of the first principles that I'm going to talk about is something that is key both to accelerated learning and to productivity,

and that is the principle of exclusivity. So if you start with as few things as possible, the things that will give you the most results from just those few things, then that goes a lot further and gives you wins that you can build on for the rest of the project. So what I would do is start with exclusivity and using what is truly memorable as the other principle behind accelerated learning. You start with as few things as possible and you learn them in a way that your mind likes to remember. These two principles can be applied to anything, but let's apply them specifically to memorizing the keys on the keyboard. So if you just look at a keyboard and just try to absorb what it is that makes it a piano keyboard, there's something that's going to pop

out at you. You have white keys and black keys, obviously, but those black keys are organized into groups of two and three. So you have two, three, two, three, and so on. Now, if you imagine that the two keys are the first thing that, you know, the number two makes you think of, which might be two eyes, then you might just imagine that you have two eyes there. Every time there are two keys, those are two i's. And what do i's do? They see. So the two i's are surrounded by the letters c and e. To the left of them is the letter c, is the note c, and to the right of them is the note e. And those are white keys surrounding the black keys. So you have the black keys that are in groups of two, and now you know C and E that straddle those black keys. What about the three? So we have groups of three as well.

Well, instead of straddling them, let's go in between those three keys. And what might you think if you have three? Well, two I's and a nose, so specifically a nose. So every time we see three keys, we'll think of a nose. And since we're not straddling it, we're not going on the outside of it. We're actually going to the keys that are within those three keys. You might imagine that somebody is punching the nose and the guy goes, gah, because it gets punched by the nose. Well, the letters G and A are those two letters inside the three black keys. So between those three black keys, you have two white keys, and those keys are G and A. Between G, A, C, and E, you easily have all the rest of the letters,

because now you can say between A and C would be B, and then between C and E would be D, and then between E and G would be F. So that's really all the letters right there. So you have C, D, E, F, G, and then back to A, B, C. So there you go. You have all the white keys. And you can easily remember them just by glancing at the keyboard,

by remembering C, E around the eyes, and ga in the nose. We simply multiplied exclusivity by mnemonics by taking as few things as possible, remembering them in a memorable way, and then letting everything else fall into place. Now what about the names of the black keys? Well the fact is we actually have the names of all the keys now. The black keys don't have their own names. Instead you think of sharpening a white key to make it go higher or further to the right, which makes a black key. So, for example, C sharp would be the black key to the right of C. Or D flat, if you flatten the key so that it goes lower, would be the one just lower than it.

So you just stick a nail up and that raises it and makes it sharper. Or you flatten it to make it lower. And that's all you really have to think about as far as making notes sharp or flat with the black keys. So I hope that gets you running, Jacob. I'd love to hear more about this. And for anyone who's into music, specifically in mnemonics, I'd love to hear more questions about this because whether you're beginning like Jacob or more advanced and are interested in Shankarian theory like I am, this is a subject that I'm really passionate about and would love to collaborate with anyone on mnemonics for music.

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Meanwhile, what do you want to learn? The world's knowledge can be yours. Leave your learning request at masterofmemory.com slash question, and I'll talk to you all again soon. © transcript Emily Beynon