The Pianumero method

Pianumero puts a number on each key a song uses: 1 is the lowest of those keys, 2 the next one up, and so on. To play the song, you press the numbers in order. No sheet music, one hand, mostly white keys: a first song like Mary Had a Little Lamb lasts about 35 seconds.

▶ Start here: 10 songs, from 4 keys to Für Elise

The guides

How a song is learned

1. Listen. The song plays while its numbers light up, so you know how it should sound.
2. Play. An arrow shows the next key; the lesson waits for you, however long you take.
3. Finish. Up to three stars: the fewer mistakes, the more stars. Then the next song, a little longer or with one more key.

The Start here path goes, in ten songs, from a 4-key song to the opening of Beethoven's Für Elise, in an easy right-hand version.

From numbers, to letters, to sheet music

Numbers come first: they teach the keyboard and the shape of melodies without anything to decode. Letters come next: every song page also gives the song in letter notes (C D E…) and a table of its keys, so you can read the same tune both ways. Sheet music is the last step, when you want to read rhythm, harmony and pieces you have never heard. By then, you already know where the notes are.

Then the rhythm: falling notes

Numbers say which key; they don't say when, or for how long. That is what falling notes add: on every song, the 🌧 Falling notes button makes each note fall onto its key, and the longer the bar, the longer you hold the key. In Play it the fall waits for you at each note; then follow the music with ▶ Listen to keep the beat. How falling notes work.

What you need

A phone, a tablet or a computer: tap the keys on the screen or press the numbers on a computer keyboard. With a real piano or keyboard, put the page on its stand and play along; Pianumero does not read a MIDI keyboard yet.

A very short history of the piano

The piano was invented in Florence around 1700 by Bartolomeo Cristofori, a keeper of instruments for the Medici family. He called it a gravicembalo col piano e forte: a harpsichord that could play soft (piano) and loud (forte), because its strings are struck by hammers instead of plucked. The name was shortened to pianoforte, then piano. Its keyboard kept growing with the music written for it, from about five octaves in Mozart's time to the 88 keys of most pianos today, the norm since about 1900.

Numbers are not new either. In China, a numbered notation called jianpu, where 1 is the first note of the scale, has been the everyday way of writing songs for more than a century. Pianumero's numbers are simpler still: they name keys, not degrees of a scale, so 1 is always the lowest key the song uses.

The method: questions

Written by Loïc Berthod, who makes Pianumero.