Piano Scales Reference
Nineteen essential piano scales with notes, fingering, staff notation, and playable audio. Free, no signup — pick a scale and listen.
Major Scales
The brightest, most familiar tonality — start here if you are new to scales.
Minor Scales
Natural and harmonic minor — the sound of sadness, drama, and most Western minor-key music.
Church Modes
Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, and Locrian — different starting points of the major scale, each with its own distinct color.
Pentatonic & Blues
Five-note scales plus the blues scale — essential for improvisation in rock, jazz, pop, and blues.
What Is a Piano Scale?
A scale is an ordered sequence of notes that defines the tonal vocabulary of a piece of music. On piano, every scale is a pattern of whole and half steps — the same shape can be played from any starting note to produce the same kind of scale in a new key. Learning scales gives your fingers familiar physical patterns and your ear a framework for understanding melody, harmony, and improvisation.
How to Use This Reference
Each scale page shows the notes on an interactive keyboard, a playable audio example, a fingering diagram for both hands, the scale on a musical staff, and the diatonic chords you can build from the scale. Use it when you need a quick lookup, when you are learning a new key, or when you are trying to understand why a piece of music sounds the way it does.
From Reference to Ear Training
Once you know what a scale looks and feels like, the next step is hearing it by ear. Fortepian's scale identification exercise plays a scale at random and asks you to identify it across 9 progressive levels — from major and minor to modes, pentatonic, blues, and exotic scales. It is the most direct way to turn your new theory knowledge into a practical skill.
Also explore the rest of the app: note identification, interval recognition, chord training, and note reading practice.