Notes → scales → ideas
Scale Finder
Turn a handful of notes into musical possibilities. Find matching scales, explore them on piano or guitar, and hear what fits.
- Free, with no account
- Your notes stay in your browser
01 / Start here
Enter your notes
Use spaces or commas. Sharps, flats and octaves work: C4 D♭5 E♭. Duplicates count once.
Not sure? Leave Unknown. The first note does not set the key.
Starting with a chord instead?
Chord syntax and limits
Supported qualities: major, minor, diminished, augmented, sus2, sus4, maj7, dominant 7, m7, dim7, m7b5, aug7, 7sus4 and mMaj7. One slash bass is allowed, such as C/G or Am7/C.
Extensions such as add9, 9, 11, 13 and altered dominants are not supported. Unsupported input is rejected with a message instead of being guessed. Slash bass notes do not change the matching set if the bass is already a chord tone.
Read the full reference on the How it works page.
Matches update as you type
02 / Pick & explore
Piano & guitar
Pick notes here, or select a matching scale to highlight it.
C4–B4 · click a key to add or remove its pitch class.
Select a matching scale to see its notes and degrees. Scale-note highlighting is not a playable guitar chord fingering.
03 / Your possibilities
Matching scales
Compare possible scales. A match is a starting point, not a verdict.
Waiting for notes
Scales whose pitch classes are exactly your input set. If several tonal centres share the set, all of them are shown.
Your next idea starts with a few notes
Choose notes on the instrument or type a note set above. Your matching scales will appear here, ready to explore.
Scale details
See, hear and harmonise
Select a result to see its spelled notes, intervals, playback, instrument highlighting and supporting chords.
A note collection can fit several tonal centres. Selecting a result is a choice you make; it is not a claim of certainty.
How to find a scale from notes
- Enter the notes you already know. Paste them from a riff, melody, lesson or chord. Spaces, commas, sharps, flats, Unicode accidentals and optional octaves are accepted.
- Choose a tonic only if you know it. Leave the tonic on Unknown when the song or lesson does not name one. The first note is never assumed to be the key.
- Compare the three match modes. Exact means the same pitch classes, Contains includes larger scales, and Nearby allows one note of difference. Read the explanation instead of treating the first result as a verdict.
- Check the spelling and instrument view. Select a result to see its intervals, supporting chords, piano notes and 12-fret guitar positions.
Starting from a chord instead? The chord input expands supported major, minor, diminished, augmented, suspended and seventh chords into notes. See the chord syntax reference for the exact list.
Three ways to match
The result tabs are not confidence levels. They answer three different questions:
- Exact note set — the scale uses exactly the pitch classes you entered, no more and no fewer.
- Contains my notes — every note you entered is in the scale, but the scale may add notes. Exact matches are included and labelled.
- Nearby matches — at most one input note is outside the scale and at most one scale note is missing from your input. This is an explicit one-note tolerance, not a hidden guess.
Exact matches are listed first inside the containing tab. Containing results favour fewer extra notes; nearby results favour fewer differences. Commonness and tonic break ties. The order is a reading aid, not a probability.
A worked example
Enter C E G and the exact tab is empty. That is the honest answer: a three-note triad is not a full scale. The containing tab shows scales that include all three notes, including C major, A natural minor and several modes. The notes alone do not choose between them.
Enter C D E F G A B and the exact tab shows seven results with the same pitch classes: C major, D Dorian, E Phrygian, F Lydian, G Mixolydian, A natural minor and B Locrian. Choose a tonic to narrow that list. Without a tonic, the tool preserves the C-major and A-minor ambiguity instead of assuming the first note is the key.
Scales in the catalogue
The finder uses 21 reviewed scale definitions on all 12 roots, with letter-aware spelling instead of a generic sharp-only list. The categories are:
Browse the full scale cataloguewith intervals and example spellings.
What it does not do
- This panel matches notes and chords. To estimate a recording’s key, Camelot code and BPM, use the Song Key & BPM Finder.
- It does not claim that a scale is the “correct” scale for a song. Notes can fit several tonal centres, and the chosen tonic changes the interpretation.
- It does not show guitar chord fingerings. The fretboard is a scale-tone map, not a playable chord shape.
- The catalogue is deliberately limited to the reviewed scales on the catalogue page. Unsupported chord qualities are rejected rather than guessed.