Reading the colours: the note, its place in the scale, or nothing
The ChromaKeys menu asks three independent questions: what the colour says, whether shared notes split apart, and whether chords are drawn. Three settings, valid on an acoustic handpan and an electronic one alike.
Whether your handpan is acoustic or electronic, a colour can say two things. It can say which note you have under the mallet. Or it can say which place that note occupies in your scale. Two different readings of the same instrument, and both are right.
The app doesn’t choose for you: it lets you choose. It’s a setting, it takes one click, and it’s called ChromaKeys.
To see this language in motion, here is the first video of the series about the app.
Click the image to open it, then click again for full size.
Click the image to open it, then click again for full size.
Click the image to open it, then click again for full size.
The ChromaKeys menu: three questions, not one
At the top of the screen, the tool bar. Inside it, an island with a multicoloured outline: ChromaKeys. It doesn’t ask one question, it asks three — and they are independent. You can answer one without touching the other two.
- Colour says… → the note · its place in the scale · nothing
- Shared notes → Off / On
- Chord drawing → there’s nothing to click here: the eye lives on each chord card, at the bottom of the screen. The island just reminds you of it.
You’ll notice each setting carries two labels: the plain word first, and the theory word in small type right beside it. The note is what others call the chakras. Its place in the scale is what’s called the degrees. I say it once here, and after that I use the plain words.
”Colour says the note”: a C always red
First possible answer. Here the colour is glued to the name of the note, and it never moves again.
- A C is red.
- A D is orange.
- An F is green.
- An A is indigo.
All twelve notes have their colour — sharps included, each with its own shade. Change scale, change instrument, change key: nothing moves. Red stays C.
The most immediate benefit is the octave. With nothing else turned on, every D on your shell is orange: the low one, the high one, the one up on the right. At a glance, you see they’re the same note at different pitches. That’s the kind of thing that takes months to absorb by ear, and becomes obvious in a second through colour.
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What is a degree? (the eight-year-old version)
Before the second answer, one word is needed. Just one.
A scale is seven places, from the first to the seventh. Like the steps of a staircase. Each note of your scale occupies one step, and only one. The degree of a note is the number of its step. Nothing more.
What’s lovely is that the steps have a character. Always the same one, in any key. I gave them names:
- I — Balance (Équilibre): home, where everything settles.
- II — Momentum (Élan): it starts, it pushes gently.
- III — Adventure (Aventure): you leave the known behind.
- IV — Ease (Détente): you breathe.
- V — Tension: it pulls, it asks for what comes next.
- VI — Nostalgia (Nostalgie): sweetness with a sting.
- VII — Mystery (Mystère): suspended, it can’t stay there.
Each one also has its vowel, to sing: OU · O (as in “beau”) · O (as in “or”) · A · E · I · M. That’s the bridge to singing, and it’s worked in the Sing & Play mode — a subject of its own.
”Colour says its place in the scale”
Second answer. Here the colour no longer looks at the note’s name, but at its step.
The I is always red. If your scale is in D, it’s the D that turns red. In E, the E. Colour follows the place, not the name. And the drawing made by the seven colours stays identical from one key to another: that’s what lets you play the same thing elsewhere without relearning anything.
⚠️ An honest caveat: this is true in Logic mode. Elsewhere — in Scales, in Creation — the button keeps the same name, but the calculation changes: every note of a chord then takes the colour of the note the chord is named after. Useful — you see at a glance which notes go together — but it isn’t reading by degrees. Look at the screenshot below: on the D Kurd, four dimples end up in the same orange as D, not because they are Ds, but because they belong to a D chord.
Click the image to open it, then click again for full size.
Click the image to open it, then click again for full size.
”Shared notes”: when one note serves several chords
Third idea, and it’s a setting of its own — that was my realisation last week: it had no business sitting inside the previous choice.
One and the same note can belong to several chords. When Shared notes is set to On, that note splits into slices — a pie, one slice per chord it takes part in, each slice in the colour of the chord concerned. When colour says the note, sharing takes another form: a thin ring around the note’s colour, which keeps the note recognisable.
Three things checked in the app as I wrote this, which I’d rather tell you than let you hunt for:
- On an acoustic D Kurd 10, eight dimples out of ten are split. That isn’t a textbook case: that’s nearly your whole shell.
- In Logic mode too, on a Neotone Mutant in C major, many dimples are cut in two. I believed the opposite; the screenshot says otherwise: the seven degrees really do share notes.
- The slices disappear as soon as a chord eye is opened. The two never coexist on screen: either you’re looking at the network of shared notes, or you’re looking at a drawn chord.
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”Chord drawing”: the eye that traces the constellation
On each chord card, at the bottom of the screen, there’s an eye. You open it, and the chord’s constellation is traced on the instrument: a path linking its notes together. That drawing is what stays the same when you change key, and that’s where Logic mode becomes a machine for understanding.
What you see depends on your answer to the first question:
- With “its place in the scale”: the whole chord takes the colour of its degree — the I entirely red — and the rest of the instrument dims to grey.
- With “the note”: the constellation is traced just the same, but each note keeps its own colour. The rest dims too.
Two ways of looking at the same chord: its function on one side, its geography on the other.
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Click the image to open it, then click again for full size.
You have nothing to set: the presets by level
If all that sounds like a lot, good news: you have nothing to do. Your level answers for you, and you can always come back to it later.
| Level | Colour says… | Shared notes |
|---|---|---|
| Discovery | the note | Off |
| Apprentice | its place in the scale | On |
| Musician | everything visible and adjustable |
In Discovery, the island shrinks to the essentials: a single switch, Off or On. The other two settings aren’t merely preset, they’re put away — you can’t knock them out of place by accident. Nothing has been removed from the app: everything comes back at Apprentice level.
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Click the image to open it, then click again for full size.
And next
Once you read the colours by place in the scale, something unexpected happens: the drawing of each chord no longer depends on the key. The I has the same shape in C, in D, in A. It is exactly the gesture of a guitarist putting on a capo — except that on an electronic handpan, the capo is a button. That’s the subject of the next article.
Click the image to open it, then click again for full size.
Click the image to open it, then click again for full size.
Ready to make your colours sing?
Try the app for free, or discover the electronic Neotone handpan.