3. Scales & degrees — “which notes sound good together”

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If you press random piano keys it sounds messy. A scale is a small family of notes that sound nice together — like a box of crayons chosen to match. You pick a starting note (the root) and a flavour (a mood):

• major = happy/bright 🙂
• minor = sad/serious 😟
• dorian = jazzy/cool 😎
• penta (pentatonic) = 5 notes that almost can’t sound wrong 👍

Once you choose a scale, you can write notes by number instead of letter. 1 is the home note, 2 the next one in the family, and so on. 8 lands you “home but one octave up.” These numbers are called degrees.

scale A minor
bass  1 . 1 . 4 . 5 .      # 1 = A, then the 4th and 5th notes of A-minor

Real name: scale, root, mode/flavour, and scale degrees. Writing by degree means you can change a whole song’s key by editing one scale line — every degree moves with it.

✅ Live now: the scale header (scale A minor, flavours major / minor / dorian / penta, optional base octave like scale C major 4) and degree tokens (1 4 5, chords 1+3+5). Note names like A3 always mean that exact pitch; only bare numbers follow the scale.

🛠️ Under the hood — MIDI numbers: the engine turns every pitch (whether you wrote A3 or a degree 5) into a MIDI number — just a tidy integer name for a pitch where A4 = 69 and +12 means one octave up. You never type MIDI numbers; it’s only how the engine does the math.

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