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To use the CrispyTuner properly, you need to know the key and scale of the song you’re performing. If the key and scale aren’t set correctly, the result won’t match the instrumental and will sound off-key.
In some cases, you may not know the song’s key and scale, for example when you’re using an instrumental leased by a producer who doesn’t supply this information. This is where the ScaleFinder comes in handy - it automatically detects the key and scale for you, without requiring you to know any music theory.
The ScaleFinder is a separate plug-in that is included with the CrispyTuner installer.
When opening the ScaleFinder for the first time, you may be asked for a license key. Simply enter your CrispyTuner license key, which will unlock the ScaleFinder on your device. If you’ve already activated the CrispyTuner, this step will be skipped!
The ScaleFinder works best when analyzing the song’s entire instrumental, especially the chords and melodic instruments. Therefore, you should add it to your instrumental track, or a bus that sums all melodic instruments in your song.
The ScaleFinder’s usage is very straight-forward: to detect the key and scale of your song, press the detect scale button and start audio playback in your DAW.
Make sure to play a part of the song that contains melody and chord progressions, if possible, to allow the ScaleFinder to detect the scale more easily.
During detection, the detect scale button will change into a waveform display, indicating that it’s processing the audio input.
After around 10 seconds, the detect scale button will change back to normal, updating the root and scale dropdowns beneath as well as the reference (A4) slider.
Once the key and scale have been detected, you can use the send to CrispyTuner button at the bottom of the GUI to apply the root, scale and reference frequency to all CrispyTuner instances in your project. This comes in very handy if you use the CrispyTuner on multiple tracks and want to update the key and scale for all of them.
You can also change the root, scale and reference frequency values manually before sending them to the CrispyTuner.
In some cases, the ScaleFinder can’t detect a definitive scale for an instrumental.
This can be caused by an instrumental that only uses very few notes and has no chords. In this case, multiple key/scale combinations may fit your instrumental, and the ScaleFinder has to decide which one is the most likely, sometimes giving undesirable results.
To work around this, try adding another melody (such as your vocal tracks) to the audio that is being fed into the ScaleFinder.
Another source for error is that the instrumental’s scale actually changes between parts of the instrumental. To work with this kind of instrumental, feed the different parts of the instrumental to the ScaleFinder separately, and use separate CrispyTuner instances with the correct key and scale for the respective part of the song.
If you have any questions, check the FAQ - chances are they’ve already been answered there! If you’re still left with questions, don’t hesitate to contact us. We’ll be more than happy to help!
We wish you a lot of joy with the CrispyTuner and ScaleFinder, and can’t wait to hear the amazing music you’ll create with it. As always, stay tuned 😉
