The Twelve Notes of the Piano Roll

Open your DAW's piano roll. On the left, you see a piano keyboard standing on its end; on the right, a grid. Each key on the keyboard matches a horizontal row of the grid, and a note drawn on a row plays the matching key. In this lesson, we'll learn to read that keyboard as quickly as a pianist reads theirs.

A keyboard turned on its side

The piano roll keyboard is a piano keyboard turned a quarter turn: low notes at the bottom, high notes at the top. You'll find white keys and black keys, and on the grid the rows for the black keys are usually a little darker. Moving up one row means moving to the very next key toward the high end, whether it's white or black.

Count them: seven white keys and five black keys, twelve notes in all. The black keys aren't second-class notes, and they aren't “wrong” notes. They're full notes in their own right, and you'll use them as much as the white ones as soon as you change scales.

Seven names for the white keys

The white keys carry the seven note names. In English, and in every DAW, those names are the letters A to G: going up from the C in the figure, you read C, D, E, F, G, A and B. Some countries, such as France, Italy and Spain, use the names do, re, mi, fa, sol, la and si for the same notes instead. Here's how the two line up, in case you meet those names in a tutorial or on a score.

Why does the octave in the figure start on C and not on A? The letters themselves run in alphabetical order from A, and after G they start again at A. But octave numbers, as you'll see in a moment, change at each C, so DAWs count their octaves from one C to the next.

Two black keys, three black keys: the landmark that never fails

Look at the black keys again. They aren't spread out at random: they form a group of two, then a group of three, then two again, then three, along the whole length of the keyboard. That's your best landmark. C is the white key just below the group of two black keys, and F is the white key just below the group of three.

“Below” means underneath on the piano roll, and to the left on a real piano, where the keyboard lies flat. With these two landmarks, you can find any white key in a second: D is between the two black keys of the first group, G and A are between the black keys of the group of three, and B is just above that group. The black keys have names too, with sharps and flats; they get a lesson of their own, a little later in this part.

Twelve rows, then it all starts again

After B, the next row is a C again, a higher one. You've climbed one octave, exactly as in the previous lesson: the frequency has doubled, and the note has the same name. This twelve-row pattern repeats from the bottom of the keyboard to the top. Listen to the twelve notes of one octave, played going up, through to the next C.

The last note sounds like a return to where you started, only higher. Since there are several C's, several D's and so on, we add a number to the note's name to say which octave it's in. That number goes up by one at each C, and all the notes from a C up to the next B share the same number.

The same C doesn't have the same name everywhere

This is the point that causes the most trouble, so let's take our time. The C in the middle of the piano keyboard, called middle C, is one and the same key everywhere. It has the number 60 in the MIDI language, which we'll look at soon, and it vibrates at about 261.6 hertz. And yet its name changes depending on where you read it.

Nobody's wrong: these are conventions, like driving on the right or on the left. Scientific pitch notation, which calls middle C C4, is the one acousticians and many textbooks use. FL Studio calls it C5, one octave higher. Ableton Live and Logic Pro call it C3 by default, one octave lower, although Logic Pro can also display C4 in its display settings. So between FL Studio and Ableton Live, there are two octaves of difference in the names, for the same key.

This site solves the problem for you. In the settings, choose your software: every note name with an octave number, in the text and on the figures, will then display the way it does in your DAW. Try it: middle C shows up here as C4. If you read C5, the site is set to FL Studio; if you read C3, to Ableton Live or Logic Pro; if you read C4, to scientific pitch notation.

Now that you can read the rows, the next lesson teaches you to measure the distance between two of them, in half steps and whole steps.