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Scale explorer
Pick a starting note and a kind of scale. The notes appear on the staff and the keyboard with the tone-and-semitone pattern that builds them — then press play, or touch any key.
Scale explorer
Try it
Build a scale
Pick a starting note and a scale. The keyboard, the notation and the step pattern all follow.
What the explorer shows
A scale is a pattern of steps, not a list of notes to memorise. Every major scale climbs tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone, tone, semitone; start that pattern on a different note and it drags in whichever sharps or flats it needs to keep its shape. Change the starting note with the scale type fixed and watch which black keys the pattern forces you onto.
The notes are spelled the way a musician writes them, with each letter used once in a seven-note scale — so E♭ major contains A♭, never G♯, and F♯ major contains E♯ rather than F. The staff follows that spelling; the keyboard shows where it lands.
The scales it covers
Major, Natural minor, Harmonic minor, Melodic minor, Major pentatonic, Minor pentatonic, Dorian, Mixolydian, Lydian, Phrygian.
Try this: choose C, then switch between Major and Natural minor. Exactly three keys move — the third, sixth and seventh. Then switch to harmonic minor and one of them moves back. That is the whole story of the three minor scales in three clicks.
Looking one scale up
For the full picture of a single scale — its degrees and their names, its key signature, its relative and parallel keys — each major and minor scale has its own page in the scale reference, with this explorer on it set to that scale.