scales-modes-and-tunings-with-pytheory

scales-modes-and-tunings-with-pytheory is a skill for Claude Code from kennethreitz/pytheory. It costs 153 tokens per session (1,720 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A music-theory guide for working with scales, modes, intervals, overtone patterns, and alternative tuning systems. A mode is a particular arrangement of notes built from a musical starting point.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to list or harmonize scales, recommend scales for given notes, calculate intervals, inspect the circle of fifths and overtone series, and work with different tuning systems.
Why use it?
It helps determine which notes fit together and which scale may suit a melody, solo, or chord sequence.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter.

Part of the composing-with-pytheory plugin — 6 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to list or harmonize scales, recommend scales for given notes, calculate intervals, inspect the circle of fifths and overtone series, and work with different tuning systems.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/kennethreitz/pytheory/scales-modes-and-tunings-with-pytheory
About the project

PyTheory is a Python toolkit for exploring music theory and composing music, with immediate audio playback and visual representations such as guitar tabs and chord diagrams. Musicians and programmers use it to create arrangements across multiple musical systems, instruments, rhythms, and effects. The catalogue add-ons provide agent guidance for working with the project.

kennethreitz/pytheory · 1,639 stars · on GitHub · pytheory.org

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add kennethreitz/pytheory --skill scales-modes-and-tunings-with-pytheory
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/kennethreitz/pytheory

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install composing-with-pytheory, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 6 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for scales-modes-and-tunings-with-pytheory

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kennethreitz/pytheory/scales-modes-and-tunings-with-pytheory/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/kennethreitz/pytheory/scales-modes-and-tunings-with-pytheory)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/kennethreitz/pytheory/scales-modes-and-tunings-with-pytheory"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kennethreitz/pytheory/scales-modes-and-tunings-with-pytheory/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

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agentmods 80×15 button for scales-modes-and-tunings-with-pytheory

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/kennethreitz/pytheory/scales-modes-and-tunings-with-pytheory"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kennethreitz/pytheory/scales-modes-and-tunings-with-pytheory.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 153 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,720 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00153 $0.01720
Opus 5 $0.00077 $0.00860
Sonnet 5 $0.00031 $0.00344
Haiku 4.5 $0.00015 $0.00172

Measured 13d ago against content hash a77bc681d9e3, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

scales-modes-and-tunings-with-pytheory scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 13d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

plugin/plugins/composing-with-pytheory/skills/scales-modes-and-tunings-with-pytheory/SKILL.md · 151 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 151 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Scales, Modes & Tunings

Scales and modes, the notes/intervals beneath them, and PyTheory's 16 tuning systems.

Scales & modes

from pytheory import TonedScale

ts = TonedScale(tonic="C4", system="western")
ts.scales                       # ('chromatic','major','minor','dorian','lydian', …)

s = ts["dorian"]
s.note_names                    # ['C', 'D', 'Eb', 'F', 'G', 'A', 'Bb', 'C']
[str(t) for t in s.tones]       # ['C4', 'D4', 'Eb4', 'F4', …]
s.harmonize()                   # diatonic chords built on each degree

Pentatonic & blues scales live in the blues system, not western: TonedScale(tonic="E2", system="blues")["minor pentatonic"] (also "major pentatonic", "blues", "major blues").

Which scale fits these notes?

Scale.recommend ranks scales by how well they contain a set of notes — great for "what can I solo with here?". Note the import: pytheory.Scale is an alias for TonedScale, so import the real class from pytheory.scales:

from pytheory.scales import Scale
Scale.recommend("C", "Eb", "G", "Bb", "D", top=3)
# [('C', 'aeolian', 1.0), ('G', 'aeolian', 1.0), ('C', 'dorian', 1.0)]
# -> (tonic, scale_name, fitness 0..1)

Detect the scale of a note set:

TonedScale(tonic="C4", system="western")["major"].detect("C","D","E","F","G","A","B")
# ('C', 'major', 7)   -> (tonic, scale, matched-note count)

Tones, intervals, overtones

from pytheory import Tone

Tone.from_string("A4").frequency          # 440.0
Tone.from_midi(69)                        # <Tone A4>
Tone.from_frequency(440.0)                # <Tone A4>
Tone.from_string("C4").interval_to(Tone.from_string("G4"))   # 'perfect 5th'
Tone.from_string("A2").overtones(4)       # [110.0, 220.0, 330.0, 440.0]
[str(t) for t in Tone.from_string("C4").circle_of_fifths()]  # ['C4','G4','D5','A5', …]

Twelve-tone rows (serialism)

A ToneRow is an ordering of all 12 pitch classes, each once. From it come the 48 forms (P/R/I/RI × 12 transpositions) and the row matrix. The transposition number is the pitch class the form begins on.

Read the full file on GitHub · 151 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 13d ago First seen · 151 lines · 153 tokens per session scan A a77bc681d9e3

Subscribe to this mod's changes

scales-modes-and-tunings-with-pytheory is a skill published in the GitHub repository kennethreitz/pytheory (1,639 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 153 tokens to every session and 1,720 once invoked, about $0.0008 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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