Find the key

What it does

You give it notes and it tells you which keys they sit in. For each one it writes the degrees with the right spelling, which of your notes fall outside the scale, and which notes of the scale you have not played yet.

It is for when you have just played something and do not know what it is called, when you have to accompany a piece and only know the melody, or when you want to know which note is missing to close a scale.

How to read the list

Fewest notes left out comes first. A scale that contains everything you played comes before one that drops a note, always.

On a tie, the smaller scale wins. Five notes that contain exactly what you played say more than seven: if you pressed C D E G A, the C pentatonic is a more precise answer than C major. C major is still there, lower down, and it brings the two notes you have not touched.

A note outside the scale does not remove the row. It is written separately, with the name it would have in that key. A scale that explains six notes out of seven is often the right answer with a passing note in it.

Relatives both show up

C major and A minor have exactly the same notes. There is no way to choose between them by looking at the keys you pressed, so the list gives both, major first. The same holds between pentatonics: C minor pentatonic and E♭ major pentatonic are the same thing written from two starting points.

Modes are not guessed

The seven white notes are C major and they are also D Dorian, E Phrygian, F Lydian, G Mixolydian, A Aeolian and B Locrian. They are one scale read from a different note, and which one is the centre is not in the keys you pressed: it is in which one sounds like home — how the piece starts, how it ends and what it leans on.

A list that put all seven modes at the top would not be ordering anything: they would be seven identical rows. So they are not there, and that is a choice, not a gap.

On spelling

Notes are written with as few accidentals as possible. E♭ major and not D♯ major, which would need an F double sharp; D♭ major and not C♯ major, which would have seven sharps instead of five flats.

The keys on the keyboard always carry the sharp, because there you are pointing at a pitch and not yet at a key.

What is not here

No sound: nothing plays from this page. No microphone detection. No modes, for the reason above. There are six scales — major, natural minor, harmonic minor, both pentatonics and the blues — the same ones Music paper can draw, so what you find here opens there with no translation.

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