Why I Avoided C Major

Back in 2017 I had been teaching myself piano for about a year and a half. I started writing about my experience thus far, the self-teaching process, thinking I'd start a blog. But I never did. Until now, and here I am in 2025, re-discovering what I wrote back in 2017 about what I'd been up to for the last year.

Piano - Year One: June 23, 2017

C is probably the first scale you learned. You think of other keys in terms of how they are different from C. In my case, I think in C. The first song I ever learned was Silent Night in C major, on a toy Magnus chord organ I got for Christmas when I was 5 years old. It came with a book that had numbers for every note and my favorite part was 9-9-11-9-7-8-10, and I still think of it that way.

In my head, G is 5 and E is 3, and it has been that way for 50 years, and I have never been able to overcome that. This means that no matter what key I am playing in, when I need to play the 5 chord, I think of that chord as "the G." I look at the white keys and mentally see numbers. If I want to remember a tune by numbers so I can transpose it later, I have to do that in C.

If you don't have this problem, make sure you don't develop it. Do not divide the world of key signatures into C versus not-C. When you are sitting at the piano figuring something out, always do it in a key with a scale that includes black piano keys.

For myself, I decided on day one of this adventure that I would always work in D by default. D major has two sharps. I figured that would be a little bit hard for me but not crazy hard. I thought about other factors when I made that decision. I had learned from more than one website that guitar players like to play in E, A, or D. Beginners who wanted to play worship piano were also advised to learn those keys. My favorite blues guitarist often played in those keys, and I hoped to be able to play along.

At the same time I made this decision, I decided to concentrate on sharps first and flats later. That is, I was going to avoid keys with flats when I looked for sheet music to play. In fact, it was more than six months before the day came when I felt the most important thing to do next was to get comfortable with flat chords.

2025 Linda here, saying in fact I have never stopped visualizing scale degrees in C when I think about them abstractly. Oh well. But I don't balk at playing songs any of the nine keys that have up to four sharps or four flats. (D-flat, with 5 flats, I have to talk myself into it.) Also, even though I gave myself a headstart on the sharp key signatures, it's still easier to play in the flat keys.