Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Tuner-Technicians Forum Assigning Numbers to Keys

After hanging out on the tech forum for a while, I noticed that the keys on the piano are simply named starting with a1 and going up from there: a1, b1, c1, and then a2, b2, etc.

However, during the previous century when I was in high school taking prep courses (to skip a few years of college music courses), we used a system where the A's would be labelled such as AAA, AA, A, a1, a2, a3, making Middle C "c1". Going up would add numbers (c2, c3, etc), and going down would be capital letters (C, CC, CCC). In college, which was unrelated to the school I went to for prep, used the same system for labeling the keys.

But now when I try to research this, I can find absolutely no reference to this labeling scheme whatsoever; it's like I am making it all up, even though I found it in my class notes from over 20 years ago.

Does anyone know what labeling system I am talking about? Or was I crazy along with professors from different, unrelated schools?

To my knowledge key numbering has always been impressed into the key in the form of numbering 1 to 88.

The scheme you listed is still used. It is useful for other instruments, like organs, where the keys may correspond to other octaves.

Look up English or Anglo-Saxon pitch notation. I think that is what it is called.

Ah, yes, Helmholtz pitch notation is what I found. Instead of numbers, it's prime, double-prime, etc (instead of c1, c2, c3, it is c', c'', c'''). Maybe I wrote the numbers in my notes to be a smart-alec, but I do clearly have C, CC, and CCC written down instead of sub-primes (C, C,,). It's close, though.

Now I have something to research in my spare time (if I can find any spare time).

Hope the link to the wikipedia article works:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmholtz_pitch_notation

Under the subheading Variations they mention the English Multiple C notation which sounds like what you were using rather than the actual Helmholtz system.

Funny how I spent so much time looking for this online, found nothing, and now I have more resources than I could ever read, online, once I was pointed in the right direction.

Thanks!

Your system is certainly used by the period-keyboard community in the UK. See for example the descriptions of the instruments in the catalogue of the recent auction of the Finchcocks collection.

The extent to which this system is or is not used in connection with modern instruments in the UK, I cannot tell you.