A friend of mine has a keyboard with less than the full 88 keys found on a standard piano. How does this limit the instrument in terms of what music can be played?
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Not a musician nor a native speaker, so excuse my lack of technical terms.You have 8 base notes on the piano. ~~A B C D E F G H.~~ Those are repeated on higher and lower octaves. Same notes, different pitches. Your friend can play the same notes as any piano but probably not as high/low as a piano with 88 keys.
Edit: See comment below for correct notes.
It limits the range to fewer octaves compared to a full keyboard. That’s not an issue with most popular music but serious players, especially of classical music, will be hampered by this.
Electronic keyboards have the benefit of transposition, so you can raise or lower the entire keyboard by one or more octaves. This gives you access to the higher or lower registers, but at the expense of losing part of the other register.
So it really depends on what you’re doing. I’m a very casual keyboardist and I still found the 48-key to be too limiting but a 61-key suits me just fine. At the other end, are people who do full production using a 25-key.
Modern western music is based on what’s called 12 tone even temper. There are 12 “notes” that repeat, the whole tones (A-F) and the semitones (sharps and flats).
Each 12 tone block is known as an octave. An 88 key piano can play 7 of these octaves. A 76 key piano will play 6 octaves, an 82 key piano will play 6.5 octaves.
This, of course, is the case for a mechanical, acoustic piano.
Digital pianos are a different creature, because they can be whatever they want to be. I have a 2 octave keyboard in my studio that I use for basic composing/transcription and it has an “octave shift” button. This button means that if I want to play low notes, I can shift it down, if I want the upper end, I shift it up. It is in essence a snapshot of the part of the keyboard I want it to be.
Their are 13 notes in an Octave – 8 white keys, the normal notes, and the 5 sharps/flats – the black ones. That pattern simply repeats itself with each octave added to the players left of middle C an octave lower from the last, each octave right an octave higher.
So what keyboards with less than 88 keys do is add an up button and a down button. 0 is middle C centre octave, -1 is with an ocatve lower than middle c at centre. +1 is the same in reverse, same with +/- 2 but thats two ovtaves up or down at centre.
You can only play music where the highest note is no higher than the highest key available, and where the lowest note is no lower than the lowest key available.
It’s actually somewhat rare for music to need more than about 4 or 5 octaves of keys. (5 octaves = 60 keys, or 61 if it’s a full 5-octave interval)
I just wanted to thank all of the people who took the time to respond to my question. I’m sure you are all talented musicians and musical theorists!
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