What is this?
This is a little tool I built to help getting to know the fretboard of a guitar, or really any string instrument. As a guitarrist, one of my wishes is to always expand my familarity with the fretboard. There are obviously many ways (and tons of apps out there) to go about practicing this, but personally, I’ve found it very useful to practice getting to know a note on the guitar as an interval, relative to a root note or key. For example, if I’m improvising over a C major chord I would like to know where all of the major thirds are on the entire fretboard. Or the other way around, taking any note, I want to know in which key it is the flat seven or the minor third. So this tool aims to help showing this for all keys and intervals. Basically, a lot to get a grip on! Hope you find it useful!
Planned feature additions
- Support for other string instruments like bass, violin, mandolin etc.
- Toggle between interval and note name
- Change tuning
- Print-button for the chosen key and interval selection.
- Other ideas? Send me an email!
Blog post on Get-a-Grip
The motivation for making this app basically came from the never-ending practice of getting to know the fretboard of the guitar better. Without going into to much music-theory or details, get-a-grip simply aims to visualize where intervals appear on the neck in relation to any given key-note. In the screenshot above, the 1th (root), 3 (third) and b7 (minor seven) intervals are shown for the key of Eb on a regular guitar. As you might guess, you can show any single interval, chord or scale of choice by checking the interval boxes.
At this point, get-a-grip is all about showing where the intervals, relating to a key-note is. However I mean to add/expose more features. In particular it would be nice to make it useful for beginners whos first priority isn’t knowing where all the flat nines in F# lies on the fretboard. Some features exists already though that isn’t showing above… For instance it works also for other string instruments and tunings. Below visualizes the chord A major on the Ukelele with the tuning GCEA.
Basically it should work for any string instrument based on half tone steps (semitones). This implies that it does not work well for things like the Turkish instrument “Baglama”, but unless you play that, you should be good to go :). For example, who doesn’t want to visualize the super locrian scale on a 17-string bass!! (see below)
