About
About Free Scale Finder
A small, free tool for the moment when you know the notes but not the scale. It is built to show possibilities honestly, not to pretend that a handful of notes proves one answer.
Why this exists
Scale identification is usually taught through patterns: a major scale shape, a pentatonic box, a mode with a certain colour. That is useful, but it can leave a gap when you have a set of notes from a song, a riff, a melody or a chord and want to know which scales contain them.
Free Scale Finder fills that gap with a narrow promise: enter notes, optionally choose a tonic, and see exact, containing and one-note nearby matches with their spelled notes and intervals. The separateaudio finder estimates key and tempo from recordings. Neither tool replaces a teacher or your ears.
Editorial approach
The scale catalogue is fixed data in the source code. Each definition has an interval formula, degree labels and a reviewed spelling rule. The matching engine does not generate scale names or notes at request time, and it does not use a language model to decide the answer.
Results are ordered by a deterministic commonness rank and then by tonic. The rank is an editorial reading aid. It is not a probability, a score or a claim that the first result is the “right” scale. There are no confidence percentages anywhere in the interface.
The catalogue covers major and natural minor, harmonic and ascending melodic minor, the seven modes, major and minor pentatonic, major and minor blues, whole tone, chromatic, whole-half and half-whole diminished, bebop major and dominant, harmonic major and Hungarian minor. The reference page lists every definition and its intervals.
Chords are supporting information
The main product is a scale finder. Chord input exists as a shortcut for entering notes, and the supporting chord cards under a selected scale are there to show the diatonic triads that belong to that scale. The tool is not a general chord finder, chord chart or tablature library.
Chord parsing is deliberately strict. A supported quality is expanded with the Tonal library; an unsupported quality is rejected with a visible message. The tool does not guess at add9, 11, 13 or altered chords just to produce a result.
Technology and privacy
The site is a static Astro build with React islands. Matching, scale spelling and chord expansion run in your browser. The interface uses no external fonts, no tracking scripts and no analytics. Playback is synthesized locally with the Web Audio API, not streamed from a sample library.
There is no account system and no server-side storage of your notes. Share links keep the musical state in the URL fragment, and the optional recent-session feature uses local storage in your browser. The privacy page explains the details.
Independence
Free Scale Finder is an independent educational project. It is not affiliated with any instrument manufacturer, music-software company, streaming service or music-education brand. Product and company names are mentioned only when they are needed to explain a music-theory concept.
The tool is free to use. There are no ads, no paid tiers and no account upsell in this build.
Corrections and feedback
Music theory has edge cases, and spelling conventions vary by context. If a result looks wrong, the most useful report includes the exact note or chord input, the result you expected, the result you saw and the tonic you selected. The contact page explains how to send that information.