Hacker News Reader

Comment by uhoh-itsmaciek | Hacker News Reader

I play bluegrass mandolin and I'm working on https://fretboard.cool to better understand scale and chords patterns across the neck. Guitar and ukulele are also supported. Very few chord and scale types are supported right now, but I plan to add more when I figure out how to integrate them without complicating the interface too much.

View on HN

This is great! Music theory is something I’ve wanted to learn, but have had a hard time finding the time/ resources that work with my brain. And I’ve been working on guitar, ukulele, and mandolin over this time of housebound-ness. I’ve learned a ton in just the last ten minutes playing with this. Like, honestly, barre chords have never made sense to me, and they just clicked with this. Still lots of practicing to do on my end, but this is great.

So so cool. Thank you for building this!

Awesome, glad you're finding it useful!

I play mandolin, but come from playing the cello: so chords are less familiar to me than scale based melodies. This looks really useful, thanks for sharing!

This is awesome! I play dobro, checking out the open D / open G guitar section. G6 / A6 / D6 tuning would be nice to have as well.

I am planning on learning pedal steel and also play 8 string dobro. I think this would be a huge asset for doing that. How hard is it to add a new "neck" and generate scales on it? I assume given a string tuning you just walk up the neck creating the next note for the scale as you go, right?

I also write software during the day, so let me know if I can help out :D

Also, the open G is not as I would expect, but I think the DGDGBD tuning is what people expect on guitar. Dobro uses GBDGBD tuning for open G, DADF#AD open D, 8 string dobro is GBDEGBDE. Would love to see those as well! Sorting out scales on an 8-string dobro is a brain melter, even worse for a pedal steel...

Thanks! I'll look up those other guitar tunings and add them. It's pretty trivial to add new ones--like you guessed, I walk up each string and find the notes of the scale or chord. I forgot to mention this in the original post, but the project is actually open-source [1] (it's on the about page but probably should have noted it). Feel free to submit pull requests or file issues. The code is pretty much create-react-app + typescript.

>Also, the open G is not as I would expect, but I think the DGDGBD tuning is what people expect on guitar.

You mean it's not what you'd expect for dobro, right? I haven't really played guitar in years, but I think that's right for guitar. I'll add a dobro section now, I just need to find the actual octaves for the notes in the tunings you list. Adding new tunings is just a simple-change [2] (though I may need to adjust mobile layout for more than six strings). I can add pedal steel, too. I wanted to add banjo, as well, but need to figure out that fifth string.

[1]: https://github.com/uhoh-itsmaciek/fretboard.cool [2]: https://github.com/uhoh-itsmaciek/fretboard.cool/blob/master...

Yeah, I just meant "not what I expect" because I play primarily dobro now which uses GBDGBD. The tuning on the website is the correct open G tuning for guitar.

Awesome, i'll check out the github repo and add a PR if I think of something to add! Thanks for adding those! I'll keep an eye on the site.

For dobro open G, an octave is four strings up or down. IE, if i'm play an A on the 1st (highest tuned) string at the 7th fret, another A can be found at the 7th fret of the 4th string.

Between strings, the steps between the strings varies so it's harder to have a single rule there.

Cool, just added six-string dobro open D and open G (right now calling it "standard" because that's most common in bluegrass and I seem to have a bug that every instrument right now needs a tuning called "standard" but can't find it).

Just checked back and see it on the site, awesome! Can't wait to mess around with some open D tonight

I started something very similar a few years ago. The chord generator is a bit buggy though...

https://guitar.tardin.com

Nice! I was shooting for something that works better on a phone, but I really like how you tie chords to the scale. I'd like to do something like that, too, but in bluegrass, out-of-key chords like II and bVII are really important, too, and not sure how to make that work.

I also decided to show all the chord notes across the fretboard, rather than specific playable chord shapes. Both approaches are useful for different goals, but I wanted something that's more about leaning the fretboard than individual chords.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com