FindYour Scale
New in Fr3tLab — tap the notes, get the scale
Here is the situation every guitar player knows. You are noodling around, you land on a handful of notes that sound right together, the riff is good — and you have no idea what scale you are actually in. So you can’t extend it, you can’t solo over it, you can’t tell the next guy “this is in such-and-such.” You just have five notes that work and a shrug.
So I added a Find Scale mode to Fr3tLab. Tap the notes you are playing right on the fretboard, and it lists every scale that contains them — ranked best fit first — then you tap one and the whole neck lights up in that scale. It works backward from how the rest of the tool works, and it is the thing I reach for most now. Free, no login, live right now.
Why I built it
Every other mode in Fr3tLab goes one direction: you pick a scale, you see the notes. Find Scale goes the other way — you give it the notes, it tells you the scale. That is the direction you actually write in. Nobody sits down and thinks “I would like to play in D minor pentatonic today.” You find a riff, and then you want to know what you found so you can build on it.
The old Identifier mode could already half-do this for chords. I pulled that logic out, rebuilt it to search every one of the 40+ scales across all 12 roots, and gave it a real ranking. Now both modes share the same engine, so the chord identifier got smarter for free too.
How the fit ranking works
Tons of scales technically contain any handful of notes. The trick is ordering them so the useful one is at the top, not buried at number nineteen. Find Scale ranks on a few things at once:
If you play five notes and they ARE a pentatonic, the pentatonic wins over the full seven-note major scale that also happens to contain them. Fewer leftover notes means a tighter fit. Each result is labeled — exact means the scale is precisely your notes, otherwise it shows something like 5 of 7.
The lowest note you tap gets treated as the likely root, so the scale rooted there floats up. Tap the same five notes but anchor a different low note and the ranking re-shuffles — D minor pentatonic and F major pentatonic are the same five notes, and Find Scale puts the right one on top based on where you put the bass.
Major, minor, the pentatonics, Dorian, Mixolydian — the scales you actually use get surfaced before the exotic stuff. The Hungarian minor is still in the list if that is genuinely the best fit; it just is not going to outrank a plain minor scale for no reason. Tap at least three notes and you get real answers; two notes fit almost everything, so it waits.
How to use it
Pull up Fr3tLab at fr3tlab.com, set your tuning and string count up top — same as always, works from 4-string bass to 8-string — and pick the Find Scale tab. Tap the notes you are playing straight onto the neck. The panel fills in with the ranked list, each one showing its fit. Tap any result and the tool jumps to that scale on the fretboard, fully lit, with the root marked, so you can immediately see the rest of the notes you did not play yet — the ones that finish the idea.
That is the whole loop: find a few notes by ear, tap them in, see what they are, and get handed the rest of the scale to keep writing. It is the fastest way I know to turn a happy accident into something you understand.
California metal guitarist — fill-in/session + wedding band
New to Fr3tLab? Start with the original build post, or browse the music section.
Jesse Moraga · Guitarist · Fresno, CA · jessemoraga.com