Online interactive fretboard might help you to play better guitar today
Learning to play guitar is a fun challenge. You have to invest your time, you can’t rush the process. But what if a tool could visualize everything, suddenly the theory starts to make sense.
Intervals are the building blocks for playing an instrument
Scales, chords and arpeggios are all assembled with intervals. Once you realize this, you only need to know which intervals are important and how to eventually compose them yourself.
For example, a scale is a certain interval. The piano visualized the major scale the best:
In this case the white keys (red dots) are important. If you leave out the black keys and re-number, you’ll get the so called “diatonic” intervals. Number 1 is called the root and in this case it’s a C note. All these 7 notes makes the C major scale.
Translate intervals to a guitar fretboard
Using the chromatic intervals on a guitar fretboard is not very helpful, it could be useful to for example count the intervals of a scale yourself, but my experience is that’s not very useful and quite hard/overwhelming to remember.
At the other hand, as seen on the piano example above, the diatonic intervals are more useful.
Building chords with the diatonic intervals
With diatonic intervals you can easily create chords
- play 1,3,5 and you have C maj chord
- play 2,4,6 and you have D min chord
- play 3,5,7 and you have E min chord
- play 4,6,1 and you have F maj chord
- play 5,7,2 and you have G maj chord
- play 6,1,3 and you have A min chord
- play 7,2,4 and you have B dim chord
One fact you could remember; there is a pattern in the start number and the name of the chord.
- the first, fourth and fifth chords are major chords
- the second, third and sixth are minor chords
- the seventh chord is a diminished chord
It’s always like this in any key of the (natural) major scale.
I created another guitar website
I am a developer with great passion for playing guitar. Lately I am trying to understand the guitar better and especially how the chords and scales are created. And how they relate to the positions on the guitar. I’ve build a website with online visualization that helped me on that. It started mostly as tool for myself, but I noticed this might be useful for others too.
The website might not be for players that are just getting started on the instrument. Its for those who wants to knows more and want to see it visualized / laid out.
I noticed while creating the website that the theory behind chords actually is easier than I thought, just some “intervals over intervals”. As a programmer that was triggering to create this tool/website, since that sounds like something that can be visualized easily. I did noticed lots of information is scattered on different sites and actually, I got most information from piano websites. I managed to add several instruments to it (and planning to add different guitar tunings too), At the moment I have added standard tuning guitar, bass, ukulele, banjo and mandolin.
Now play some music!
Translating the theory to real guitar playing can be hard, but it is a rewarding challenge! It helps when you can easily visualize everything. Try using the site during your practice sessions. I like to switch between note names and diatonic intervals (since lots of online tutorials talk about such steps) or switch to different keys.
If you are curious, feel free to check out:♡
interactive-fretboard.com
Disclaimer; I haven’t studied music theory, so the information on the website isn’t based on any standard.
