Now it's time to learn a little bit about the left hand, if you'll happen to be right hand dominant, which most people are, you'll notice that your left hand doesn't obey your commands quite as easily as your right hand. So what does that mean? Should we just give up and accept that the left hand is not so good at piano? No, of course not. What that means is we spend a little bit more of time practicing the left hand parts, because let's face it, we spend all day telling the right hand to do stuff for us. And it does and it gets lots of practice anyway.
And then we sit at the piano and we say hand left hand, it's your turn to play. And we're surprised that the left hand says I'm not really sure how Do that. So let's be fair to the left hand and to ourselves. And let's make sure that we're giving it enough practice will the left hand be as good as the right hand at the piano? Probably not, it'll probably always be a little bit weaker than your right hand. Now, this is if you're writing on dominant if your left hand dominant, then reverse everything I just said, and apply it to the right hand.
So we know that the key to the left of the two black keys is see if we go toward the left on the piano and find the next set of two black keys and go to the left, that note is also called C. But this one is not metal. See, you can hear it's lower. Here's middle C, middle C. Oh, I cannot sing that low. Okay, so that's maybe more of a male voice down there. So do you hear that even though one c sounds higher, and once he sounds lower, they both sound like the same note I'll show you the difference. I'll play a C down here, and a D up here.
Listen. Definitely not the same note, right? But C and C. That's the same note. So when we have the two notes that have the same letter name, that are separated by eight nodes 12345678, we say that they are an octave apart. octave. octave is the prefix for eight.
So it's pretty easy to remember, like an octopus has eight legs or an octagon has eight sides, and octave is a distance of eight notes. See, sing. Great, here's a middle C. Let's go down one octave to find the C below middle C. Now, I'm going to play with My fifth finger starting on the C, an octave below middle C, watch me first. Let's do that again. And this time we're going to join me. So find a middle C, go down an octave, put your fifth finger on it, and remember, all we're doing is stepping up to your thumb, and then stepping back down.
We're not repeating the thumb though. So I'll count to four so that we start at the same time. Remember that the wrist is going to help you a lot if you try to just use the fingers. Ouch. That's really hard. But if you let the weight of your arm help every finger it's a lot easier.
Are you ready? Let's play it 123 For what do you think you might find that your fourth and fifth fingers are little bit weaker than even the first, second and third, that is completely normal, even for professional pianist who have been playing 6070 years, fourth and fifth finger are still going to be a little bit weaker than the others. That's just anatomy. And that's okay. So let's do that one more time. Remember to let your arm help 1234 Pause the video here.
Practice and click play to go on. In this lesson, you started to use the left hand and learn the left hand finger numbers 12345. You also learned that an octave is a way to measure a distance of eight notes. In the next lesson, we'll get some more exercise for that left hand.