All The Scales
For years there’s been a spreadsheet floating around with every possible musical scale which I share and consult now and then. Just now I asked an AI to convert it to a website, and it did! You can search, filter, and even play back the scale tones.
I’m not sure who made the original, but the first I saw of it was a post by u/omegacluster on reddit, pointing to this spreadsheet. Whoever it was that put this together deserves a lot of credit, as this was clearly a lot of work.
I think musicians will find this endlessly interesting. Beyond listing literally every conceivable musical scale, it’s a great reference for scale names and synonyms. For example when I was taught the 5th step of the harmonic minor as a kid, my teacher just called it “the Eastern scale” (a truly ambiguous and terrible name). However from the reference we can see that its common name is the Phrygian Dominant, and also known as:
- Phrygian Major
- Mela Vakulabharanam
- Raga Jogiya
- Ahiri
- Vativasantabhairavi
- Zilof
- Ahava Rabba
- Freygish
- Jewish
- Maqam Hijaz-Nahawand
- Humayun
- Spanish Gipsy
- Dorico Flamenco
- Hitzaz
- Harmonic Major
(Some of this corroborated by Wikipedia.)