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Scale finder.
Pick a scale and get its notes, its chords and the Camelot key it sits in — or pick the notes you can hear and get every scale that contains them. It is the only scale reference that connects the theory to the records.
Root
Scale
A Natural minor (Aeolian)
The default of electronic music, by a distance — the A ring of the Camelot wheel is where almost every set lives.
The notes
1
2
♭3
4
5
♭6
♭7
On a keyboard
The chords in it
| Degree | Chord | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| i | Am | A · C · E |
| ii° | Bdim | B · D · F |
| III | C | C · E · G |
| iv | Dm | D · F · A |
| v | Em | E · G · B |
| VI | F | F · A · C |
| VII | G | G · B · D |
A Natural minor (Aeolian) contains exactly the same seven notes as A… so it sits at the same place on the wheel as its parent major. Modes do not have their own Camelot codes. If you are mixing rather than writing, 8A is the only number that matters here.
The same notes, rooted elsewhere
· · · · ·
61.2% of the tracks we hold are filed in a minor key. That is not a genre quirk — it is what electronic music is, and it is why the A ring of the Camelot wheel is where almost every set lives.
Every scale at a glance
Fourteen scales, brightest to darkest.
Rooted on A, because A minor is the busiest key in the catalog and the one everybody has a reference for.
| Scale | Notes on A | Size | What it is for | Camelot |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lydian | A · B · D♭ · E♭ · E · G♭ · A♭ | 7 notes | Major with a raised fourth. Floating and unresolved — the sound of a breakdown that never quite lands. | — |
| Major (Ionian) | A · B · D♭ · D · E · G♭ · A♭ | 7 notes | The bright one. Rare as a whole-track key in club music and common in the vocal on top of a minor track. | 11B |
| Mixolydian | A · B · D♭ · D · E · G♭ · G | 7 notes | Major with a flat seventh. Where funk, disco and most house basslines live. | — |
| Dorian | A · B · C · D · E · G♭ · G | 7 notes | Minor with a raised sixth. Minor without the sadness — the default for deep house and a huge amount of techno. | — |
| Natural minor (Aeolian) | A · B · C · D · E · F · G | 7 notes | The default of electronic music, by a distance — the A ring of the Camelot wheel is where almost every set lives. | 8A |
| Phrygian | A · B♭ · C · D · E · F · G | 7 notes | Minor with a flat second. That flat second is the entire sound of hard techno and a lot of psytrance. | — |
| Locrian | A · B♭ · C · D · E♭ · F · G | 7 notes | A diminished fifth means no stable home chord. Almost nobody writes in it, which is the point of knowing it exists. | — |
| Harmonic minor | A · B · C · D · E · F · A♭ | 7 notes | Natural minor with the seventh raised back up. The gap between the sixth and seventh is where the Eastern-sounding melody comes from. | — |
| Melodic minor | A · B · C · D · E · G♭ · A♭ | 7 notes | Minor going up, major coming down — in dance music, minor with a major top half. Jazzy and unstable in a useful way. | — |
| Minor pentatonic | A · C · D · E · G | 5 notes | Five notes, none of which can clash. What to play a lead over when you do not know the track's key yet. | — |
| Major pentatonic | A · B · D♭ · E · G♭ | 5 notes | The bright five. Every festival topline that has to work in a field. | — |
| Blues | A · C · D · E♭ · E · G | 6 notes | Minor pentatonic plus the flat fifth. The extra note is the whole flavour, and it is the one that sounds wrong on its own. | — |
| Phrygian dominant | A · B♭ · D♭ · D · E · F · G | 7 notes | The fifth mode of harmonic minor. Flat second, major third — the sound most people mean by "Middle Eastern". | — |
| Whole tone | A · B · D♭ · E♭ · F · G | 6 notes | Six equal steps and no leading note, so nothing resolves. Useful for a riser and unusable for a bassline. | — |
Only the plain major and minor rows carry a Camelot code here, because the rest borrow their parent's — which is the point made below.
The thing no scale page says
Seven modes, one place on the wheel
D Dorian, E Phrygian, F Lydian, G Mixolydian, A minor and B Locrian all contain the same seven notes as C major. They are one collection with six different starting points. A DJ mixing two records only cares which notes are available, so all seven of them are Camelot 8B — there is no such thing as “the Camelot code for Dorian”.
This is why a track a producer describes as being in D Dorian shows up in your library as 8B or 8A depending on which note the detector heard as home, and why both are right. It is also why the mode matters enormously when you are writing and not at all when you are mixing.
The scales that do get their own position are the ones that are not modes of the major scale: harmonic minor, melodic minor, the pentatonics, blues and whole tone. Those genuinely contain different notes, which is why the tool leaves their Camelot cell empty rather than making one up.
Frequently asked
Common questions
Do modes have their own Camelot codes?+
No, and this is the single most useful thing on the page. All seven modes of the major scale contain exactly the same seven notes — D Dorian, F Lydian, A minor and C major are one collection of notes with different starting points. So they all sit at the same position on the Camelot wheel. If you are mixing rather than writing, the mode is irrelevant and only the wheel position matters.
What scale has these notes?+
Switch the tool to "I know some notes", click the ones you can hear, and it lists every scale containing all of them, ranked by how few extra notes each one adds. A scale that adds nothing is an exact match. Three notes usually give a handful of answers, five usually give one or two.
Why does the pentatonic have no chord table?+
Because you build the chords of a scale by stacking that scale's own thirds, and a five-note scale does not have any to stack. Every page that prints chords for a pentatonic has borrowed them from the seven-note scale it came from, which is a real answer to a different question. The tool says so rather than filling the space.
Which scale is most electronic music in?+
Minor, overwhelmingly. Of the tracks we hold with a detected key, a clear majority are filed on the minor side of the wheel — the exact share is printed under the tool and comes from the live catalog rather than from a guess. Dorian, which is minor with a raised sixth, is the other one you hear constantly in deep house and techno without anyone calling it that.
What is the difference between a key and a scale?+
A scale is a set of notes and a key is a scale with a home note that the music keeps returning to. In practice they are used interchangeably, and for mixing purposes they are: two tracks in the same key have the same notes available, which is what makes them fit. The distinction matters when you are writing and almost never when you are mixing.
Why are the scales ordered like that rather than alphabetically?+
Brightest to darkest. Each mode down the list flattens exactly one more note than the one above it, so you can read the row above as "slightly happier" and the row below as "slightly darker" without knowing what a mode is. Lydian at the top has a raised fourth; Locrian at the bottom has a flat second and a flat fifth and no stable home chord at all.
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DJ terms on this page: Camelot key · Harmonic mixing · Musical key · Pitch fader · Relative major and minor · Full glossary