Key

Beats includes a piano keyboard, specifically designed for keying records.

Piano

Tap a key on the piano to hear the note. The main display at the top of the screen will shows the currently selected key and the three other keys that mix well with it.

To find the key of a song, play notes up and down the keyboard until the tonic—the root note of the scale is found. This can usually be identified because it “feels” right or matches the bass note (especially the first bass note of the bar).

Working out the key of song takes a little bit practice, but once you’ve done it successfully a few times, you should be able to identify the correct key in a matter of seconds.

More information can be found in our Key Mixing help document.

Octave (-, 0 and +)

This cluster of buttons control the octave of the keyboard. - is one octave down, + is one octave up.

Min and Maj

Use Min and Maj to set the current key to either minor or major.

Please note! The key sounds have been designed to play as loud as is possible. However, due to the nature of commercially available music, it’s usually not possible to hear the metronome over the top of music playing on the iPod. In a future release we hope to be able to lower the iPod’s volume, but that’s currently not possible.

For more information about key mixing, please read this wikipedia entry, or our key mixing help document.