[davee5]

I love this.

When I first started taking guitar seriously, after years of kid piano lessons, I really struggled to "find" notes. I mostly play both by ear and by visual shape, not by intervals or reading staves. So while taking jazz music theory courses I eventually sat down at a piano with a guitar in my lap, played the note on the keys to find the note on the fretboard, and then carefully drew out a scale map exactly like the one you have here for every mode I wanted to learn. Knowing what "shape" a scale had from the root has been enormously useful while improvising at my (still) intermediate level. I have kept that piece of notebook paper I wrote out for over 20 years now. This is a much finer implementation!

My only initial feedback is to put some of the logarithmic visual compression between frets into the visuals. This is a visual learning tool and visually the fretboard is not evenly spaced. Also, maybe dot markers?

[Gianca]

There is a specific formula to compute fret widths, that is something like that:

Dn = [(L – Dn-1) ÷ 17.817] + Dn-1

I implemented it in my guitar learning software, because, I agree with you, visual perception is important in my opinion: https://www.fachords.com/guitar-learning-software/

[jseban]

Why would you try to learn an instrument in such a hard way, instead of just using existing method books? The guitar is not exactly uncharted territory, there are guitar departments in universities..

[davee5]

Snarky answer says "why would you learn to improvise from a textbook?"

Actual answer is: because after 10 years of having a mediocre classical piano teacher beat the love out of my must-syncopate-Beethoven-fingers I decided to learn guitar on my own terms.

I spent hours a day in my room with music I wanted to sing, screwing around with tabs and chord charts and fingering charts. Later when I took a jazz theory course (at a university no less!) I was handed staff music with all these weird scales: mixolydian, dorian, phrygian -- I had no idea this stuff existed. Since I never learned to read staff music on guitar, but I know it on keys, I had to translate by ear. Since I was learning improvisation I wanted a map of the "acceptable" notes that I could mess around on my just hitting them at random. (In a way this is like a hack's Wayne Krantz improv exercise.)

Every autodidact builds their own ruts and then when it's time to learn new tricks they have a choice: build on the rather particular foundations already laid and see if some interesting and useful architecture can be laid on top, or tear it down and do it the "normal" way. I chose expedience and uninterrupted passion, but had to hack my way into it. And I still love the instrument, and I still play in those mental visuals scribbled onto yellow legal paper.

There are myriad ways to approach the guitar, and it seems I found mine. When I check out something like the Pat Martino video course[1] I find it completely baffling, if not profoundly impressive. In my read people think guitar is easier than it is because the 4-chords pop chart is not hard to achieve, but if you want to exceed that the learning curve shifts quickly. I think Chris McQueen of Forq / Snarky Puppy / etc explains this all rather well. [2]

[1] Pat Martino sees different things than I do on the fretboard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wc7Qvp8Zs6U&list=PL2TrPkuyjM...

[2] Chris McQueen knows he makes it look easier than it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCLv-tiQBuk