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Show HN: Interactive guitar scales diagrams

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Re: Show HN: Interactive guitar scales diagrams

#51

Post by sgwizdak »

machak wrote: post #34
steamer25 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 for text explanations. I have a decent internalized understanding of western music theory and it's application on guitar but it seems like it would be a pain to try and decode the meaning of all of the colors, polygons and icons. Even if I did spend significant time on that, I fear I'd still be left wondering if I was missing some of the insights you might be trying to convey. For the time being, it might be usefu…

Thanks for the feedback. I'll add help files and explain scaler/pentanizer differences. Scaler is "traditional" way of learning scales, but I think pentanizer makes more sense...it just needs to be explained bit more. My main focus right now is to introduce print possibilities. I am just bit tight on time right now.

This is great! I've been working on trying to work these out on the fly, and this is a great way to check yourself.

One feature idea: options to display seven and eight string versions of the chart. Extended range guitars are popular, and there aren't many great scale references.

Re: Show HN: Interactive guitar scales diagrams

#52

Post by tephra »

teabee89 wrote: post #41

I'm a self-taught moderate guitar player and I feel like this is really cool, but I don't understand any of it. Can someone explain how to read this, and what to do?

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 this as "flat third". If you don't know music theory this might be confusing so please let me know if I've explained it in a non-understandable way.

To understand why we say "flat third" is that it is the third note in the _Major_ scale lowered half a step (or one fret on the guitar). So the A Major scale is A B C# D E G# G#, the Pentatonic Minor scale takes 5 notes from this scale, namely A(R) C#(3) D(4) E(5) G#(7) (original indexes in parens). We then lower the C# third note, and the G# (seventh note) so we get the scale A C D E G and those notes are what you see over the fret board.

Re: Show HN: Interactive guitar scales diagrams

#53

Post by chestervonwinch »

machak wrote: post #40
chestervonwinch wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A minor has no flat notes, but when selected, shows b3, b6, and b7. I must not understand what you mean by 'flat note of a scale'.

I hope this might help (I am not very good at explaining it): https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/17426/naming-scale...

Cool. I understand now after reading the discussions in the link a few times. Sadly, I never delved very deep into music theory, despite having played guitar for nearly 20 years.

Re: Show HN: Interactive guitar scales diagrams

#54

Post by machak »

chestervonwinch wrote: post #53
machak wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope this might help (I am not very good at explaining it): https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/17426/naming-scale...

Cool. I understand now after reading the discussions in the link a few times. Sadly, I never delved very deep into music theory, despite having played guitar for nearly 20 years.

Give it a shot, it's worth it. I also played for years before I started looking into theory part, but I wish I started way earlier.

Re: Show HN: Interactive guitar scales diagrams

#55

Post by markvdb »

Professional guitar teacher here.

I had to look for a few minutes myself before this started making some sense. I'm sorry to say that I can't feed to this to my students as it is.

On one hand, it's extremely information dense. All the colors! On the other hand, it seems to lack crucial information that might make it worthwile.

Sorry if that sounds very negative. I do appreciate the effort a lot! And I di see potential to use a further evolution of this in my teaching practice.

P.S. One hint for a small/easy update: include French style note names as an option. They're in use in quite a few more places than you'd think...

Re: Show HN: Interactive guitar scales diagrams

#57

Post by machak »

markvdb wrote: post #55

Professional guitar teacher here. I had to look for a few minutes myself before this started making some sense. I'm sorry to say that I can't feed to this to my students as it is. On one hand, it's extremely information dense. All the colors! On the other hand, it seems to lack crucial information that might make it worthwile. Sorry if that sounds very negative. I do appreciate the effort a lot! And I di see potentia…

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.

Re: Show HN: Interactive guitar scales diagrams

#58

Post by machak »

code_duck wrote: post #56

I'm quite familiar with the music theory behind all of the scales, having played instruments for over 30 years, but I'm not finding the information display or interface to be very intuitive.

could you be any more constructive, I mean, which parts are confusing / none intuitive?

Re: Show HN: Interactive guitar scales diagrams

#59

Post by pdpi »

machak wrote: post #57
markvdb wrote: post #55

Professional guitar teacher here. I had to look for a few minutes myself before this started making some sense. I'm sorry to say that I can't feed to this to my students as it is. On one hand, it's extremely information dense. All the colors! On the other hand, it seems to lack crucial information that might make it worthwile. Sorry if that sounds very negative. I do appreciate the effort a lot! And I di see potentia…

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 particularly pathological case is D# major, where almost all notes are misnamed — You should have D# E#, F##, G# A# B# C##.
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