
Show HN: Interactive guitar scales diagrams - machak
https://grunfy.com/scaler.html
======
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...

~~~
Grue3
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 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.

~~~
slimshady94
Sounds like something described here?
[https://www.guitarmasterclass.net/guitar_forum/index.php?sho...](https://www.guitarmasterclass.net/guitar_forum/index.php?showtopic=52237)

~~~
Grue3
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.

------
cyberferret
Nice work. I like it.

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
Great idea about freeboard scaling!

------
teabee89
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?

~~~
tephra
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.

~~~
narag
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?

~~~
uglycoyote
> 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.

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

------
mmartinson
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.

~~~
steamer25
+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 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.

~~~
machak
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.

~~~
lukas
Could you say a little more? I think I understand the "scaler" and it's how I
learned the scales and how I practice, but I'm curious what the pentanizer is
suggesting to do. Picking a root and an interval and finding it all over the
fretboard?

~~~
machak
This may help:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Guitar_Theory/comments/8c1s9i/penta...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Guitar_Theory/comments/8c1s9i/pentatonic_shape/)

There is a youtube link video link included which explains the concept.

~~~
lukas
That’s pretty awesome - I hadn’t seen it before. Thanks for the link!

------
cnasc
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)

~~~
posamari
What kind of music do you play and how do you like the new tuning so far? Were
there any unexpected difficulties or benefits?

~~~
cnasc
I would be hard pressed to come up with a coherent genre for what I play, I
guess it's really a hodge-podge of everything I've been exposed to musically.

I like it a lot. I'd say I play 95% in P4 now, after starting about 3 months
ago. I keep another guitar tuned standard right next to it, and find myself
reaching for it less and less the more I get used to it. If you know standard
tuning well, most of the work is just a matter of reprogramming your muscles.

The biggest trade off is that all your open and barre chords are gone (there
are open and barre chords in P4, but many of them are hard to play and none of
them are straight equivalents to what you have in standard--the other side of
that is that some unusual chords are now easier, so it's a good way to
experience a different flavor), so if you play music that relies on those you
have to make a big adjustment. That can be an opportunity, since now you have
to get creative with how you play. A chord over 3 or 4 strings doesn't sound
as huge or sparkly as an open chord, for example, but it can be interesting in
its own right and of course it also opens up some sonic room if you're into
layering many parts together.

The biggest gain is that the scales and chords you learn are now always the
same without that b-string bump. A lot of things just have less mental
overhead now. The benefits sound less tangible than the drawbacks, I know, but
I think it's worth a try. It's pretty easy, just tune your two highest strings
up a semitone. And easy to go back if you hate it, of course.

------
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](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.

------
code_duck
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.

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

~~~
code_duck
A couple issues/questions on desktop:

\- the hover effect makes the lighter color buttons seem to disappear,
especially once pressed

\- I have no idea what the R button does or why

\- pentatonic major is an uncommon scale and odd choice for default -
pentatonic minor might be better, or just major

~~~
machak
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.

~~~
code_duck
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.

~~~
machak
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)

~~~
code_duck
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?

------
digsmahler
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?

Thank you, you're really killing it!

~~~
machak
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](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...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3DCpJlGQFA&feature=youtu.be&t=126)
3\. I use some own JS on top of [http://svgjs.com/](http://svgjs.com/)
library...I'll need to cleanup things and make it somewhat "stable" before
opensourcing it.

------
ad1ttya
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/](http://fretviz.com/)) ?

------
Dynocator
Very nice!

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.

------
pklausler
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.

------
dluan
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 :)

------
slig
+1 for using SVG. It looks awesome.

Are you using some SVG library or making it "by hand"?

~~~
machak
I am using [http://svgjs.com/](http://svgjs.com/) It's very lightweight but
doesn't have much features though.

------
markbnj
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 :).

------
tvanantwerp
As someone who stopped trying to learn guitar around middle school, I'm
totally lost. Must make more sense if you're well practiced, I suppose.

~~~
mbo
I'd say I was reasonably well practised and this still makes no sense.

------
rocheio
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

------
osteele
Here’s a thing like this I made for violin/viola/cello scales, when I was
learning music theory a few years ago.

[http://osteele.github.io/fingerboard/](http://osteele.github.io/fingerboard/)

------
sbilstein
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.

------
haddr
I think I'm missing the Phrygian scale could we add it? Great stuff btw.

~~~
machak
I'll add more scales in the future, for time being you could check
[https://grunfy.com/modenizer.html](https://grunfy.com/modenizer.html) It has
different coloring, but you can use 1-5 shapes to "dissect" it

------
feconroses
Very useful! If you could also add note sounds, that would be amazing!

------
sonar_un
This looks fantastic. Though some labels would be nice. It's difficult to find
out what all the colors and the numbers mean. Adding an audio library would be
a nice addition.

~~~
phkahler
R is the Root note of the scale while the numbers are notes in the full scale.
A pentatonic is a regular major/minor scale with 2 notes removed. The blues
scales are the pentatonic with one note added. The colors are simply a way to
highlight a geometric pattern - learn to play the patterns (and bounce around
within them) and how they chain together to form various scales over the whole
neck. Explaining some of these things is more of a theory lesson than
something you can just add a few labels, and the colors for the patterns don't
have actual names at all AFAIK.

I agree this could be expanded on in some ways.

Edit - wait, the colors are not just patterns, there are common chord forms
that fit over them as well.

------
matt_the_bass
It would be great if you could use the same “engine” to make similar tools for
other stringed instruments: bass, ukulele, banjo, cello, violin, etc

------
slyrus
Very nice! It might be nice to have (at least as an option) the fretboard
narrow the distance between frets as you go up the neck, like a real
fretboard.

------
SmallSuggester
Very nice. Small suggestion: make guide dots positions like on real guitar.
Specifically, on 9th, 12th, and 15th frets instead of just odd frets.

------
anigbrowl
This would be a lot more accessible if you could 'strum' the strings with the
mouse cursor while you had different chords selected.

------
ff7f00
Good stuff! Any plans to add arpeggio patterns?

~~~
machak
added to my .plan (stay tuned;-)..no pun intended)

------
RomanPushkin
Very cool. It would be nice if I could pick a list of my chords and switch
between them with single mouse or keyboard click.

------
king_magic
This is fantastic. I am eternally lazy about mapping out scales. This makes my
guitar life easier. Great job!

------
gmcnaught
Love this.

One thing I’ve been doing lately is overlaying chords over the scale to do
something similar to the CAGED method.

------
fold_left
Damn I'm not seeing anything other than the navigation and a red footer, in
Firefox on latest Android.

~~~
machak
sorry about that, just downloaded firefox on android and for me it does render
the fretboard but it only takes like 1/3 of the screen. Will look into it
asap.

~~~
fold_left
No problem at all, excited to check it out all the same when I get back to my
laptop.

------
djangoEm
Nice work. I'm really impressed. I think with addition of an audio lib, it'll
be perfect.

------
Exuma
The last row of buttons don't work on mobile (they don't update the view)

~~~
machak
to be honest, I targeted desktop audience, and running linux (and android)
myself, I am bit limited in this (testing) area. I might be getting an iOSmac
device soon so that might help. What browser/OS are you using?

~~~
ChristianGeek
The scale name buttons don’t have any effect for me on the iPhone. Their
rendered state changes but that’s it.

------
bajsreddit
I would love a left handed one. It's very difficult for me to use otherwise.

------
blueside
Nice work, love SVG use.

Can this be flipped for left handers?

~~~
machak
unfortunately, not at the moment. I think with some code "flipping" it would
be easy to support. I;ll look into it.

------
chestervonwinch
very cool! did you consider adding note sounds?

edit: also, what does the 'b' prefix signify? I'm not familiar with it.

~~~
neilprosser
I took that to be the flat notes so b6 would be a flat sixth note of the
scale.

~~~
chestervonwinch
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'.

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

~~~
chestervonwinch
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.

~~~
machak
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.

------
0xFFFE
Thank you for the wonderful work.

------
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](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.

------
andrepd
What am I looking at?

