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Show HN: Interactive guitar scales diagrams

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Re: Show HN: Interactive guitar scales diagrams

#91

Post by machak »

code_duck wrote: post #90
machak wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

R marks "relative" major/minor, for example: A minor pentatonic is relative to C major pentatonic (contains same notes/shapes, just root note is different). I can/could change defaults, but, all your presets should be saved between the sessions (your next visit). I am in the middle of making some interface changes, hopefully buttons will behave better after it. Thanks for feedback.

You're welcome, i may have some more feedback. One thing I want to mention is that tool tips or other onscreen help would be useful.

I was thinking about tooltips but those are tricky to implement for mobile devices (although I haven't spend much time making it usable for small screens/devices)

Re: Show HN: Interactive guitar scales diagrams

#93

Post by [deleted] »

pdpi wrote: post #59
machak wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can be quite intimidating at first I guess. It makes (starts to make) sense once you turn off some shapes and start connecting them together one by one. I am not sure if you had a look at the "pentanizer" parts, but that one is even worse at first sight, but once you isolate certain parts I think (very subjective) it becomes helpful if you study interval parts.

I have one bit of constructive criticism for you. Every single Major/Minor scale should have exactly one each of ABCDEFG, so that written music makes sense — each line/space corresponds to a "letter", and the key signature tells you how sharp/flat that "letter" is. The tool gets this wrong for example in C# major, where you should have the 3rd step be E# instead of F, and the 7th step to be B# instead of C. A particu…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Interactive guitar scales diagrams

#94

Post by uglycoyote »

Hello! This is cool, I was really interested in this because I have been building something very similar, a little side project that I started working on some time ago.

You can check it out here

http://sonicpines.com/fretboard

(still somewhat of a rough, half baked demo, so expect bugs)

For the most part I have been building it for myself, to help my understanding as I was taking some guitar lessons. But I thought I might eventually release it as an app.

It seems we took a very similar approach, I'm also using an SVG visualization (though, I have to say, your version is a bit more visually appealing, kudos for that), and you can choose your key and scale in a similar way (though my demo is limited to a pretty small number of scales right now). I have WebAudio playing some recorded guitar sounds on mine, though I think sometimes this is more annoying than useful.

I have been surprised by the comments of a few friends that I have showed it to who are learning guitar as well, who could not make heads or tails of it. I suppose it requires a certain bit of music theory background before you can really get in to an app like this. I was quite surprised by the guitar teacher saying he didn't get it and didn't think it would be useful in teaching. My guitar teacher keeps drawing all of these kind of diagrams by hand which are all parts of what can be seen on my app (or yours) and it seems odd to me that this kind of an app would not instantly make sense to anyone who is trying to learn the fretboard.

I guess on your app one thing that wasn't totally obvious to me was what the colouring in between the notes represented. In one version of the app it seemed to just represent the space between one note and the next, but in another it seems that you are colouring areas of the fretboard to represent the different "boxes"?

Myself, I already know a lot of music theory from Piano (hence the use of little mini-piano keyboards as key/note selectors on my app), so for me it's all about learning how the stuff I know from piano maps on to the guitar. I could see how for someone without any music experience learning guitar for the first time, all of the different terminology and reasoning behind it all might not be self explanatory. That's not a failing of your app necessarily, just that music theory in itself is a bit weird. Perhaps that makes an app like this a bit of a niche thing, the fact that you need to know some music theory to use it. Maybe some people who are learning would find it beneficial if it packaged more in a tutorial form where there are different "lessons" which introduce the concepts a bit at a time and keep coming back to the same fretboard interface as a visualization.

Re: Show HN: Interactive guitar scales diagrams

#95

Post by uglycoyote »

narag wrote: post #69
tephra wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's give it a shot. So first I have marked "Pentatonic Minor" and "A" as our key since this is probably a scale that you know. What you are seeing are all the notes in the scale laid out on the fret board. If you look at fret 5 (second dot) and starting from the E string you'll see a red dot with a R in it. This is the "Root" of the scale, namely A. The next note is on the 8th fret and has a "b3" in it. You read th…

I had understood what the diagram means, actually I have most of this information internalized... not a great guitar player, but I know the theory. What I don't understand is what can I do with it. What's the typical way of using it?

> What's the typical way of using it

I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I have been building a similar app so I can speak to my use case. In my case I'm building it because i have been trying to learn how to play in a more improvised way. I have been playing guitar for a long time, but have always been a chord-strummer, usually just kind of sing-and-play, more recently has gotten in to more advanced finger-picking "fingerstyle" patterns, but have mostly never strayed far from the bottom 4 or 5 frets because I'm just playing open chords or the odd barre when I need to. My goal now is learning more of the fretboard, learning to play "lead" a bit more, or just experiment with recording multiple tracks, jamming over a song or a looped track, or play with a friend.

Typically what my approach would be is to come up with a chord progression in a particular key, say A Minor. Then if I want to solo over top of it I need to stick mostly to the notes of the A minor scale. So the notes in the A Minor scale are just the natural notes, A B C D E F G, that's easy, but visualizing where they are all across the fretboard is not obvious, so hence the app to help with this. In taking lessons I have learned about the various fretboard "boxes" and having a visualization like this app can help you see how the different box patterns all fit together.

Another aspect that this has helped me with is visualizing chords at various places on the fretboard: if you have a song in A minor with a typical chord progression, say A-minor, D-minor, E, then your goal when you are soloing or improvising on top of it is to try to hit notes that are within the current chord, not necessarily all of the time, but to emphasize those notes and usually land on these "target notes" at the end of a phrase. These "target notes" are a subset of the A minor scale, and that subset changes depending on where you are in the song.

So being able to visualize the shapes of those chords and how they fit in to the different box patterns is important. Knowing all of the chords not only in their "open" positions but the myriad of other positions that they appear on the neck is a bit of a challenge, and I find that having a visualization tool like this can be a nice reference.

Re: Show HN: Interactive guitar scales diagrams

#96

Post by Grue3 »

slimshady94 wrote: post #80
Grue3 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-taught (shitty) guitar player here. The diagram made perfect sense to me. In fact, I sketched a diagram like that when I was practicing playing every scale in every position. First I noticed that each pentatonic scale shape has 2 minor third intervals and 3 major second intervals on five strings (sixth string is always the same as first) and they kind of "loop around". And if you put the five possible shapes sid…

Sounds like something described here? https://www.guitarmasterclass.net/guitar_forum/index.php?sho...

For septatonic scales I use the following mnemonic: there are 14 notes in 2 octaves and they are distributed among 5 strings. 14=4*3+2 so there's one string with 2 notes and 4 strings with 3 notes. And it always goes like

OO-O

OO-O

O-O

O-OO

O-OO

The semitone steps seem to "gravitate" towards the 2-note string. So just loop this pattern around and you get all possible septatonic scale shapes (modulo the offset caused by shorter distance between G and B strings). Also the second note of the two-note string is always a minor scale root.

Re: Show HN: Interactive guitar scales diagrams

#97

Post by narag »

uglycoyote wrote: post #95
narag wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had understood what the diagram means, actually I have most of this information internalized... not a great guitar player, but I know the theory. What I don't understand is what can I do with it. What's the typical way of using it?

> What's the typical way of using it I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I have been building a similar app so I can speak to my use case. In my case I'm building it because i have been trying to learn how to play in a more improvised way. I have been playing guitar for a long time, but have always been a chord-strummer, usually just kind of sing-and-play, more recently has gotten in to more advanced finger-picking…

Now I understand. I use other tricks to do the same thing, so I didn't see it before, thanks.

Re: Show HN: Interactive guitar scales diagrams

#98

Post by code_duck »

machak wrote: post #91
code_duck wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're welcome, i may have some more feedback. One thing I want to mention is that tool tips or other onscreen help would be useful.

I was thinking about tooltips but those are tricky to implement for mobile devices (although I haven't spend much time making it usable for small screens/devices)

True, i didn't notice the lack of hover tips until I used the desktop. But if it's oriented towards desktop, might as well put them in?

Re: Show HN: Interactive guitar scales diagrams

#99

Post by lkhz »

I like your work, it looks and feels awesome.

However, I would argue that you should be very careful while using it. And here's why.

I've been playing guitar for 10 years, and I had two teachers, one of which was a blues/rock/jazz improvisation teacher.

I used to draw scale diagrams, and use some pre-drawn diagrams as well. But for some reason I could easily improvise cool melodies in pentatnoics, but I had hard time with all other scales.

I stopped trying to learn improvisation despite my teacher's desperate attempts to make it work for me.

And then I found https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkaqfgSqtHg

It's a short video by Guthrie Govan, easily one of the best guitarists in the world.

And what he says that conventional method of learning scales is bad.

Essentially, what he offers is to learn to add notes modes to pentatnic scales.

And now I use that approach, and my playing is much more melodic and musical. It's a pity that I found the video way too late.

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