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...
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 side to side in a certain order, they also form a loop. And then I extended that looping pattern to septatonic (major/minor) scale. I don't know if I'm making any sense right now, but it made me instantly memorize all the scales in a way that wasn't explained in any of the guitar tutorials on the Internet I've seen. Until now, I guess.
"I had to look for a few minutes myself before this started making some sense...On one hand, it's extremely information dense. All the colors!"
If you keep the layout, keep all the buttons in place (maybe invisibe or grayed out), and strip down the interface to just one idea, what idea would you use to communicate how to use this tool?
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.
* Can we have an option to show the note names (A, Bb, B etc.) instead of the relative scale positions? Crucial for learning the actual fingerboard notes IMO. You may already have it there, but I may have missed it. (Ability to toggle between the two would be fantastic).
* Fingerboard markers are not as obvious as I would like. I was looking for fret numbers actually, and then eventually noticed you had fingerboard markers - but the light grey make them hard to see. (And what to the black/gold dot markers denote?). I am used to seeing bright, consistent fingerboard markers on my guitars.
* Having stared at guitar fretboard for > 40 years from all angles, I always have a hard time when I see fretboard diagrams with constant spacing between the frets. Makes it harder for me to visualise exactly where it is on the neck that I need to start. May I suggest an option to show a scaled neck (doesn't have to be exact, just an approximation of wider spacing at the nut and narrower towards the bridge) just so it becomes easier to relate the position to an actual guitar neck? (Also make the 12 fret really REALLY obvious so you know where the repetitions start).
But aside from these, I think this is brilliant and I have bookmarked it for future reference.
EDIT: Scratch my first suggestion above :D - I see you already have a note/position toggle along the bottom!
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?
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.
Take this backing track[0] and try using the A pentatonic minor scale or A blues scale from this website and practice soloing using the marked notes. Try staying "in the box" which are the highlighted areas where you don't have to move your hand a lot to play all the notes of the scale.
Here's an example of someone mostly staying "in the box[1]." Is that even the right term?
Love this. As someone who has been playing casually for years with a few attempts to use scales and music theory to up my base understanding, this is something I could see myself using a lot.
Having some labels or explainers for the different toggles would be helpful.
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 useful to just provide a key/legend where each term links off to some third party site that already has an explanation of the respective term.
Also, it'd be good to explain what the different views are good for. E.g., what's the difference, when viewing A-minor pentatonic, between the scaler view vs the pentanizer view?
FWIW, I'm on a moderately aged Android phone. If there's more to the desktop experience (e.g., hovertext?) it'd be good to add a note saying so.
Pretty cool! I made something like this a few years ago, but nowhere near as sophisticated. One suggestion: as of late I've been playing guitar in perfect 4ths tuning, and it would be helpful to be able to change the tuning of individual strings on your tool to enable that (and any other alternate tuning)
if you're looking for scales in alternate tunings, an old website called "all guitar chords"[1] has got you covered, even if it's not as pretty an interface as OP's site. I found it very useful years ago when re-working some hindustani music for guitar in open C tuning. it's one of those sites I'm always a little surprised hasn't just vanished from the internet.
also, just because it's a saturday, I suggest anyone into open tunings on guitar check out this list of tunings used by james blackshaw.[2] his music is a lot of fun to play.
The blues scale should somehow indicate that the flat 3rd needs to be bent up to get that blue note from West African music that sits between our flat and natural thirds in western tonality. It’s absolutely necessary to get a real blues sound.
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.
First, it must be said that this is super cool, and I love it so much!
I've got questions...
1. What is the relationship between the bottom colored dots and the colored notes? I'm looking in the "scalar" tool, key of C. It looks like the bottom dots are for coloring a cross-fretboard position. I would have expected the red bottom dot to mark the position from C on the 8th fret for all the scales, as it does for pentatonic minor to dorian. However pentatonic and blues major are on the 5th fret position, and major is in open position.
2. The pentanizer, what is it? I also don't understand the relationship between the colored and numbered dots and the fretboard coloring. The UI has a strange way of switching the numbers if I switch the scales. E.g. select pentatonic major, red dot, and 1 dot. Then switch to pentatonic minor, and it auto-switches to 5 dot. Overall, it's pretty disorienting the relationship between these design elements and the scales. Or I've fundamentally misunderstood the tool.
3. What tools did you use to make this? Will you open source?
1. Bottom colored dots are connected to shape colors, nothing else. Those shapes are often (in guitar literature) referenced by number, 1 to 5 (e.g. pentatonic shape 1), I decided to use colors
2. Pentanizer is adding interval colors. It splits "scaler" shapes into 5 micro interval shapes. It is explained in https://grunfy.com/updates.html section and this video might help to understand the concept: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3DCpJlGQFA&feature=youtu.be...
3. I use some own JS on top of http://svgjs.com/ library...I'll need to cleanup things and make it somewhat "stable" before opensourcing it.
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.
This looks amazing! Just started studying intervallic improvisation and this will help alot! do you have any plans to add support for alternate tunings or let the user to modify the tuning (like this tool: http://fretviz.com/) ?
To anyone wanting to break out of that "locked-in" and boxy style of playing both scales and chords, I suggest listening to how Allan Holdsworth approaches arrangement.
His books/instructionals are amazing. Completely changes your perspective on how to build chords and how to play scales over them.
This is amazing! Looking at this I learned and realized a lot of patterns that I never really considered before.
One thing about the UX of it - because you haven't gotten enough feedbsck on that already; a demo of how the scales work would be cool. E.g., perhaps on first load, the scales could play for one section automatically starting from the bottom string and then going up. Then I think people could realize what the dots represent, the colors, and how it all ties together.
Well done! I'm curious to know how all this works from a math/theory perspective, but not curious enough to get in over my head :)
This is quite cool, nice work! I'm a self-taught player and only in the last five years or so have I managed to punch through the fog and begin to understand what I'm doing. This is a great tool for visualizing scale positions and finding roots. I use smartchord on my phone, but this is a much more accessible reference when playing. +1 for including the Martin serial number lookup, although I already knew my D18 was built in 1974 :).
Very nice! Love the large collection of scales you have (750!) Do you have them all hardcoded or does the site generate them from base principles / interval patterns?
For those that may want a more random experience while practicing, I made asciitabs.com a few months ago. Not as polished or full-featured as machak's site but would likely appeal to the same audience
It's beautiful but as a fairly experienced musician, I think it's a bit information dense with all the symbols and letters. The aesthetics are great but I'd love maybe some slimmed down information.
I'll add more scales in the future, for time being you could check https://grunfy.com/modenizer.html
It has different coloring, but you can use 1-5 shapes to "dissect" it
[+] [-] markvdb|7 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] Grue3|7 years ago|reply
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 side to side in a certain order, they also form a loop. And then I extended that looping pattern to septatonic (major/minor) scale. I don't know if I'm making any sense right now, but it made me instantly memorize all the scales in a way that wasn't explained in any of the guitar tutorials on the Internet I've seen. Until now, I guess.
[+] [-] xtiansimon|7 years ago|reply
If you keep the layout, keep all the buttons in place (maybe invisibe or grayed out), and strip down the interface to just one idea, what idea would you use to communicate how to use this tool?
[+] [-] machak|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] baby|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cyberferret|7 years ago|reply
Some suggestions:
* Can we have an option to show the note names (A, Bb, B etc.) instead of the relative scale positions? Crucial for learning the actual fingerboard notes IMO. You may already have it there, but I may have missed it. (Ability to toggle between the two would be fantastic).
* Fingerboard markers are not as obvious as I would like. I was looking for fret numbers actually, and then eventually noticed you had fingerboard markers - but the light grey make them hard to see. (And what to the black/gold dot markers denote?). I am used to seeing bright, consistent fingerboard markers on my guitars.
* Having stared at guitar fretboard for > 40 years from all angles, I always have a hard time when I see fretboard diagrams with constant spacing between the frets. Makes it harder for me to visualise exactly where it is on the neck that I need to start. May I suggest an option to show a scaled neck (doesn't have to be exact, just an approximation of wider spacing at the nut and narrower towards the bridge) just so it becomes easier to relate the position to an actual guitar neck? (Also make the 12 fret really REALLY obvious so you know where the repetitions start).
But aside from these, I think this is brilliant and I have bookmarked it for future reference.
EDIT: Scratch my first suggestion above :D - I see you already have a note/position toggle along the bottom!
[+] [-] matt_the_bass|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teabee89|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tephra|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] elsherbini|7 years ago|reply
Here's an example of someone mostly staying "in the box[1]." Is that even the right term?
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22mWUkAi0PI
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_7JYRhLUgA
[+] [-] mmartinson|7 years ago|reply
Having some labels or explainers for the different toggles would be helpful.
[+] [-] steamer25|7 years ago|reply
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 useful to just provide a key/legend where each term links off to some third party site that already has an explanation of the respective term.
Also, it'd be good to explain what the different views are good for. E.g., what's the difference, when viewing A-minor pentatonic, between the scaler view vs the pentanizer view?
FWIW, I'm on a moderately aged Android phone. If there's more to the desktop experience (e.g., hovertext?) it'd be good to add a note saying so.
[+] [-] cnasc|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tribby|7 years ago|reply
also, just because it's a saturday, I suggest anyone into open tunings on guitar check out this list of tunings used by james blackshaw.[2] his music is a lot of fun to play.
1. http://www.all-guitar-chords.com/guitar_scales.php
2. http://archive.fo/uqH3d
[+] [-] adzm|7 years ago|reply
This also opens up the possibility of using this for other string instruments with other tunings, like ukelele (gCEA) and banjo (gDGBD) et al.
[+] [-] posamari|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pklausler|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] code_duck|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] machak|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] digsmahler|7 years ago|reply
I've got questions...
1. What is the relationship between the bottom colored dots and the colored notes? I'm looking in the "scalar" tool, key of C. It looks like the bottom dots are for coloring a cross-fretboard position. I would have expected the red bottom dot to mark the position from C on the 8th fret for all the scales, as it does for pentatonic minor to dorian. However pentatonic and blues major are on the 5th fret position, and major is in open position.
2. The pentanizer, what is it? I also don't understand the relationship between the colored and numbered dots and the fretboard coloring. The UI has a strange way of switching the numbers if I switch the scales. E.g. select pentatonic major, red dot, and 1 dot. Then switch to pentatonic minor, and it auto-switches to 5 dot. Overall, it's pretty disorienting the relationship between these design elements and the scales. Or I've fundamentally misunderstood the tool.
3. What tools did you use to make this? Will you open source?
Thank you, you're really killing it!
[+] [-] machak|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lkhz|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ad1ttya|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dynocator|7 years ago|reply
To anyone wanting to break out of that "locked-in" and boxy style of playing both scales and chords, I suggest listening to how Allan Holdsworth approaches arrangement.
His books/instructionals are amazing. Completely changes your perspective on how to build chords and how to play scales over them.
[+] [-] slig|7 years ago|reply
Are you using some SVG library or making it "by hand"?
[+] [-] machak|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dluan|7 years ago|reply
One thing about the UX of it - because you haven't gotten enough feedbsck on that already; a demo of how the scales work would be cool. E.g., perhaps on first load, the scales could play for one section automatically starting from the bottom string and then going up. Then I think people could realize what the dots represent, the colors, and how it all ties together.
Well done! I'm curious to know how all this works from a math/theory perspective, but not curious enough to get in over my head :)
[+] [-] markbnj|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tvanantwerp|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rocheio|7 years ago|reply
For those that may want a more random experience while practicing, I made asciitabs.com a few months ago. Not as polished or full-featured as machak's site but would likely appeal to the same audience
[+] [-] osteele|7 years ago|reply
http://osteele.github.io/fingerboard/
[+] [-] sbilstein|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] haddr|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] machak|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] feconroses|7 years ago|reply