Scale Syllabus
Every scale, shown and heard
iOS
Android
macOS
Every scale, shown and heard
Scale Syllabus puts the 253 scales of Complete Scale Syllabus (Musicalia 3) by Gianluca Barbaro in your pocket, and lets you see, hear and transpose every one of them.
The scales are not a stored list. The app rebuilds them with the algorithm the book itself was made with: every seventh chord, every combination of available tensions, folded together by rotation. That is why the numbering matches the printed page exactly — scale 145 here is scale 145 in the book.
There are no accounts, no advertising and no network. Everything — including the sound — is computed on your device.
Complete Scale Syllabus (Musicalia 3) — Paperback ↗ · Kindle ↗
Any scale in standard notation, on a piano keyboard, or on a guitar or bass fretboard — drawn as vectors, not pictures, so it stays sharp at any size.
Transpose to any of the twelve keys, with every note spelled the way a musician would write it: one letter per degree, and the fewest accidentals that keep it readable.
Pick a mode and the scale is shown from that note, in the key you chose. The tonic stays where it belongs; only the starting point moves.
Guitar and bass, both of them. Read the scale as a whole map — every occurrence of every note along the neck — or touch a fret and see the run your hand can play from there without moving out of four frets. Where two fingerings cost the same, tap again and the other one appears.
Ask for a chord and the neck shows a shape a hand can actually hold — open strings taken wherever they help, a fourth finger free to double a degree. There is never only one: tap the same fret again and the next shape comes up, on the bass too.
A four-note chord can be arranged sixteen ways inside two octaves, and they all have a name: four close, four drop 2, three drop 3, three drop 2+3, two drop 2+4. Tap to walk through them. The bass note of the reading is always there — on A-7/C you get the C.
Play a scale or any of its chords, ascending or arpeggiated, with the notes lighting up as they sound. The audio is synthesised offline — nothing to download.
Every degree lists the triads and four-note chords it carries, inversions included. Tap one and the same three views draw it, and its arpeggio is what you hear and what gets printed.
Which scales contain this one, and which ones it contains. The catalogue is a map, not a list, and every link is one tap away.
Choose it once and clef, written octave and transposition follow: an alto saxophone reads in E♭, and the range shown is the one you can actually play.
Any scale becomes a sheet of engraved music — all its modes, its arpeggios, a data block underneath — ready to print, export as PDF or share.
Six short chapters and a glossary explain what a scale, a mode, a tension and an inversion are, with figures the app draws itself. Open to everyone, free.
Mark the scales you work on and write your own notes on any of them. They stay on your device, and they stay yours.
The book's own derivation quietly loses four chord types, and with them five scales. This app generates them too — appended at the end, so that not a single number from the printed book moves. The book's 253 are the book's 253; the app shows 258 and says so.
Note spelling follows musical function rather than whatever is cheapest to compute: a minor seventh chord is written C E♭ G B♭, never C D♯ G A♯. Choosing a mode rotates the notes already spelled instead of respelling them, so a degree keeps its letter.
And the music is black on white, in the dark theme too. Colour is a highlighter here, never ink.
Three scales are always open: major, harmonic minor and melodic minor — and with the major come all its modes, natural minor included. You can open two more of your choice, and the ones you open stay yours.
A single purchase — Scale Syllabus Complete, €9.99 or the equivalent in your local currency — opens all 258 scales and unlocks printing, PDF export and sharing.
Nothing you do in the app is sent anywhere, because the app does not send anything anywhere. There is no network code in it at all: your key, your favourites and the notes you write stay in your device's own storage.
No accounts, no advertising, no analytics, no tracking of any kind. The full text is in the privacy policy.
One app on all three: the same catalogue, the same drawings, the same sound on a phone, a tablet and a Mac.
Complete Scale Syllabus (Musicalia 3), Gianluca Barbaro, 2018 — ISBN 978-1-7178-2330-4. The catalogue of every scale that contains a chord: 253 of them, numbered, with their structure, their modes and the chords each degree carries.
The chapters of A bit of music theory draw on a second book by the same author, Foundation and Practice of Music — the fundamentals, from intervals to chord construction.
Foundation and Practice of Music (Musicalia 1) — Paperback ↗ · Kindle ↗
Reports of wrong or missing scale names are welcome, as they are for the printed book: me@barbaro.it.