Octaves are the major parts of the piano and you must have heard about the term octave if you are familiar with the music or musical instruments. However, most of us lack thorough knowledge about this term and to help in that scenario, we have considered mentioning some of the important points related to octaves and piano here in this blog.
What is an Octave?
Before we proceed further to the blog, we would like to speak a bit about the term octave. Octave comes from the Latin root “octo,” meaning eight. An octave stands for the interval from one musical pitch to another note.
There are eight white keys to get and cover the distance from one note to the next note and this is why these groups of eight white keys are recognized as an octave. The distance is always similar while a musician plays the piano. When a performer plays both the C keys at the same time, one gets a higher sound than the other.
How Many Octaves Does a Piano Have?
A regular, full-sized piano has 52 white keys and 36 black keys, 88 keys total; this in total consists of seven complete octaves. When we talk about the notes of this musical instrument, it consists of minor and major notes.
Minor notes are the black notes and major is the one with white colour. When a musician plays an octave he doesn’t always employ all the present octaves to play each song on the instrument. There are songs that need some lower notes and majorly higher notes.
Do Octaves Matter?
When you initially began learning or playing instruments like the piano you will initially have to begin playing notes and octaves in the starting period only. Although there are myths that say you don’t need to get introduced with octaves to play this musical instrument, which is completely wrong. And anyone who wants to move ahead with piano learning needs to get familiar with octaves.
Octaves are something that makes music from the piano sounds better and engorges the smooth piano learning journey. Also, on the other hand, you can begin employing octaves to play one note at a time.
Playing octaves, for anyone often instantly adds depth to the song they are learning. Octaves are employed to round out the tune of a song as it works well by adding higher or lower pitch to the music played.
How Can a Musician Play Octaves Smoothly?
We recommend memorizing the octaves.
When a musician is new to piano learning, looking at the whole set of keys on the piano board is overwhelming. And it often gets tough to memorize each note at the beginning of the learning journey. However, to ease the stress learn and memorize a single note initially. That’s eight white keys and five black keys. It will smooth your learning journey.
Stretch!
Stretching your hand and fingers seems so undemanding, but it is important, especially for beginners. It’s also cooperative to practice stretching the hand across an octave while keep resting thumb and pinky fingers on the first and last notes of the keyboard.
Practice as Much as You Can
This is the major point when it comes to beginning the journey of learning any musical instruments, especially the piano. We recommend the practice as much as you can and practice other demanding octaves while moving hands up and down as required. Lead your thumb to move to the correct note while keeping the fingers spread at the same distance over the octave.
Winding-up
Here in this brief blog, we have considered some of the integral steps and points to know before you start your piano learning journey. We basically considered an integral part of the piano that are octaves.
Read the above article to know how many octaves are there in the piano and why are they important.
