When playing a melody, you may want to know what scale it is using.
Once you know the scale, it is easier to expand on the melody with improvisation, or to find chords to use with it if you are songwriting.
Let's say we are playing a fragment of a melody that contains the notes C#-D-E-F#-G.
Step-By-Step
Step 1
To identify the scale of our notes, we are going to use one of the workspace tools, the Notes To Scales window. We can open this with the following command:
| Button | Menu |
| Tools-Notes to Scales |
Step 2
The Notes To Scales window appears on top of the workspace. The Notes area at the left contains a button for each note that can be pressed.
We need to select our notes in the Notes area as shown.
Step 3
As soon as the notes are entered, the Scales list at the right shows us the scales which contains these notes as shown.
Each scale is ranked with a percentage showing how many of its notes appear in the melody. A higher percentage usually indicates a better choice of scale.
In this case the two results are D Major and B Harmonic Minor, and are ranked equally at 71%, indicating that we have entered five out of the seven notes of each of these scales.
D Major is likely to be the best choice. Adding extra notes from the melody will make it clearer which scale you are playing.
See Also
