Today you’re going to learn how to memorize the piano notes on the keyboard – all in less than two minutes. How? Using a clever mnemonic device I’ve literally taught to kindergartners.
At the end of this post I’ll tell you where you can get a quiz to make sure you’ve actually learned this and a PDF cheat sheet to help you out as well.
How Grandma and Her Dog Will Help You Memorize the Piano Notes
If you notice on the piano keyboard we have groups of two black notes and three black notes. Any time you see three black notes we’re going to call this “Grandma’s House” and any time we see two black notes we’ll call it a “Dog House.” Why? Because grandma has a dog house and the dog house is smaller, so grandma gets three notes and the dog get two notes.
Inside the dog house, guess what lives there? A dog! So the note in between the two black notes is a D.
Now this dog has two friends, a cat and an elephant. Yes, he’s a pretty weird dog. So the note to the left of the D is a C and the note to the right is an E. Boom! Now you know three notes memorized – DCE.
At grandma’s house, like any house, there’s a front door, F, and a back door, B. In the house, grandma, G, is baking an apple pie, A. So, we have a front door, grandma, apple pie, and back door – FGAB. Now, you know all of these notes as well.
Anywhere on the keyboard these notes are all the same and so you now know all of the white notes. Let’s discuss the black notes next.
You’ve probably heard of sharps and flats before. A flat is anytime a note goes down, just like a basketball, when it goes flat it goes down or shrinks. So, if we play any of the white notes and go down to the black note to the left of it, we have a flat.
A sharp is just the opposite. Sharp goes up – the sharpest kids in their class go to the top of their career. When you play a black note to the right of a white note, that’s going to then be a sharp.
This video let’s you see exactly what I mean.
And there you have it! All the notes of a keyboard in under two minutes!
To review, we have the three black notes with grandma’s house and the white notes are:
- F – Front door
- G – Grandma
- A – Apple pie
- B – Back door
For the dog house, the two black notes, we have the following white notes:
- C – Cat
- D – Dog
- E – Elephant
And finally, flats go down and sharps go up.
That’s it!
You can get the free PDFs and Quiz here.
Let me know what score you got down in the comments of this blog post!