A Note on Fingers

The xylophone is looking pretty good right about now... I'm awash in piano tutorials, and every one seems to employ a different system. However, there's consensus between Wikihow's How to Teach Yourself to Play the Piano, Lisa's (I don't know her last name) Piano Video Lessons and James Rhodes' How to Play the Piano book that each finger and thumb needs to be assigned a note. Doing this now will instill good habits and prevent bad habits from forming. Makes sense. What doesn't make sense to this opinionated beginner is numbering the notes (as Wikihow suggests) or numbering the fingers (as Lisa instructs in her excellent video). For example the thumb would be 1 and/or the C note; the index finger would be 2 and also the D note; and so on. To me, this unnecessarily complicates things and creates another layer of abstraction. I'll follow James Rhodes on this and for the right hand designate the thumb for C, index finger for D, middle finger for E, ring finger for F and pinky for G. Note sure about the left hand. I haven't gotten that far in his book.