Before you learn anything on the piano, you must understand a little bit of the basics. So where does one start? Well the start of learning any instrument begins with scales. Scales are the foundation and building blocks of chords and melodic lines in music.
The foundation of modern western music is mainly built on scales that contain intervals between notes known as, half tones and whole tones. If you incrementally play nothing but half tones on the piano, you would be playing what is known as the chromatic scale.
However, most popular western music is based on the diatonic scale. The diatonic scale is a 7 note scale build with 5 whole step and 2 half step tones. A great example of this is the major scale which has the intervals of whole, whole, half, whole whole, whole, half. These intervals can be heard if you were to play all the white keys on the piano.
If you notice playing the piano, there will be black and white keys. Going from a white key to a black key is a half step. Most of the time, going from a white key to the next white key is a whole step. However there is an exception that happens twice during one octave from one white key to the next white key being a half step, which is when you are going from the E note to the F note and from the B note to the C note. These two intervals are only a half step!
This exception is the reason that if you were to play all the white keys starting from C to the next C and octave up, you would be playing the C major diatonic scale. Again looking at the intervals of whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half; you will notice that the half steps happen during E to F and B to C.
So to further explain things about whole steps and half steps, most white keys on the piano when playing piano scales are whole steps, but this is not always the case. However every white key to its next black key is a half step. The half step is the smallest increment in a scale you can use in modern western music. A whole step is equal to two half steps. So playing a C note to its next white key on the piano, the D note, would be a whole step; however playing the black key next to the C note would be a C# and would be a half step interval.
As you will notice, while playing piano scales, the black keys are reserved for notes that have a sharp or a flat, such as the note of C# or Db. The sharp (#) is reserved for raising a natural note up a half step. A flat (b) is reserved for lowering a natural note down a half step. These half steps are used when playing in playing piano scales that contain “accidentals”. However accidentals are beyond the scope of this piano scales article.
Now that you understand what the difference is between a half step and a whole step, we can now use these to construct further things such as scales and chords. Which of course, chords and scales are the foundations to writing or playing real music. Lets move on to how chords are formed.