Due to a serious lack of performance chops, Irving Berlin had a transposing piano and used it to play everything in F#. He is quoted by some hack writer as saying, “The black keys are right there, under your fingers. The key of C is for people who study music.”
And I never said there was a law that states that. Similarly, there is no law that says that a piano has to be tuned the way it is.
It’s just most ‘common’. Which I believe is the word I used. I buy my guitar strings in packs of 6 and practically all of them are labelled E, A, D, G, B, E. It’s how most modern guitar songs are played - simply because it gives you access to the most amount of chords. It is considered ‘standard’ tuning.
Yeah, the B major scale, in particular, feels really good under the hands – when you run up the keyboard, it’s white, black, black, white, black, black, black, white, from B to B, and the thumb falls on the white notes, and the other fingers on the blacks, which pretty much naturally follows the shape of your hand. For similar reasons, the F blues scale (F, Ab, Bb, [ B ], C, Eb) particularly well-suited for blazing fast runs, as well.
Thanks jovan, that’s the kind of answer I was expecting. I will curse the pipe organ next time I’m struggling to transpose a song.
Awesome answer.
That Foccroulle guy, however, I want to punch him. Three boards AND feet.
See it’s like this, there’s no key of hear.
This discussion reminded me of the Continuum fingerboard, which you could use with a piano MIDI sound, I suppose.
Here is a short demo, some organ music, and a great demonstration of how it works.
All in a day’s work for the competent organist (of which I am not one 
). Interesting moment at about 6:20 when he hits Swell to Great - on this instrument the keys are mechanically slaved by the coupler.
Maybe a nitpick, and definitely a tangent, but I think the answer to this question is “it is A… Too.” The key of (“Natural”) A-***minor ***is played, from A to A, on the white keys only. There’s nothing that says that Major keys are “the” keys to measure anything by or against. Also, “Middle A” (Above Middle C) is the standard note used in tuning (most commonly, Middle A = 440 Hz – pretty much universal nowadays, although different values were used in the past.)
The system from which our scales and keys evolved was that of hexachords. Here, the bottom note was designated ‘gamma’, and then it began with A-B-C-… Note that this more or less coincides with the types of intruments jovan mentions.
To add a bit more on why C is C, the notion of writing pitches using letters goes back to ancient Greek musical notation. Greek musical theory made it to the middle ages mostly through the very abstract writings of Boethius. Boethius, writing in latin, used the latin alphabet and presented a system where the first fifteen letters were used to describe the notes of two octaves.
During the middle ages, this system was adjusted and interpreted in different ways. For instance, the 9th century musician Hucbald used the letters A-B-C-D-E-F to represent the notes from do to fa (C to A). His contemporary, Odo of Cluny instead took A to G for the notes la to sol, which is the system that survived. At the time of Odo, however, letters were the only way to write down a melody, so notes beyond the A-G compass were written with further letters, going as far as P, or by doubling letters: AA BB CC. In German B stands for B-flat and H stands for B-natural, so that the major C scale is: CDEFGAH. Of course, many languages use do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-si, which doesn’t really imply an order to the notes.