Getting started

Most contemporary music follows the same classical patterns of scales and chords. This program helps you to learn the purpose of musical scales and chords, or assists you in general song writing as a reference.

To start off, select a root note from leftmost column and a scale from the middle column. For beginning it's better to stay with Major and Natural Minor scales. If you have done it, notes in the scale should appear in the topmost field and related chords should appear in right column.

Clicking on the chord will display chord notes in bottom field and if everything is configured correctly you should hear the chord play. Depending on your computer speed the notes in chord may sound little off time because of the design flaws of current implementation.

To use those chords in musical piece you should know a thing or two about musical theory. First chord displayed (on minor and major scales) is called the tonic chord this is the middle point of your music and should dominate in the song. Other two important ones are 4th (subdominant), and 5th (dominant). You can basically make song using only these three chords. Using other chords will alter the mood of the song entirely. So try and find out what kind of chord progressions you like the best.

Try out those progressions:
1 - 1 - 4 - 5
1 - 6 - 4 - 5
1 - 5 - 6 - 4

Ofcourse slamming plain chords gets boring. But if you thought this is everything you can do with chords then you are wrong. Even if you don't hear chords like this in music, they are most often still there.

You don't have to play all chord notes at once. But you can arpeggiate over the chord notes. Play them in row. For example A minor chord progression: Amin - Dmin - Emin - Gmaj can be played as A - C - E - A, D - A - F - A, E - G - B - E, B - D - G - B. [sample]. Basically the same chords but put into right order and you have excellent melody.

So in nutshell:

Find right chords you like.
Put them into your composing software
Build melodies using notes from the same chords

Also:

You don't have to use all the notes from a chord on same instrument. Mix it and mash it.
You can use notes outside from those basic chords if you feel they sound cool

Additional info

Bugreports & questions: suva a t sva.ee

This program won't probably work on internet explorer and never will.

There are many more things to do

Scale Finder

Renoise

Getting started

Additional info

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