Show HN: A free tool to visualise scales on a guitar

Show HN: A free tool to visualise scales on a guitar(stringscales.com)

27 points by ambewas 1 year ago | 18 comments

Hey everyone,

I wanted to share something I’ve been working on that I think could be really helpful for fellow guitarists. It’s called StringScales (https://stringscales.com), and it’s a free tool that I built because, honestly, I've been able to learn so much about music on the internet, and I wanted to contribute something useful.

It started as a personal project. I’ve always felt that a lot of the tools available for guitarists could be better... more intuitive, more accessible, and without the constant need to pay for basic features like CAGED or 3NPS position highlighting.

So, I created StringScales to help visualize a plethora of scales across the fretboard in a way that’s straightforward and fully customisable to your practicing or teaching needs.

There’s no hidden costs or premium versions - just a simple, free tool that I hope will make your practice sessions a bit smoother. Whether you’re just starting out or have been playing for years, I think you'll find something useful in it.

I have a lot of features still planned (chords visualisation, harmony generation,...) but the only way I can keep making StringScales better is by deeply understanding the needs of the community. So, if you do decide to give it a try, I’d really appreciate any feedback.

Take a look at https://stringscales.com if you’re interested!

alok-g 1 year ago |

This is lovely!

Two features that would be useful for me:

1. Being able to see multiple chords in a time sequence that use a given note, say E4. My teacher told me that I should practice singing a given note while playing multiple chords having that note. This would help with singing, ear training to recognize chords by the ear, as well as learning chord progressions for a given song. Initially I would like this to be any chords through a given note, whether on the scale or not, and later also limiting to those falling on a given scale.

2. It may be helpful to be able to rotate and flip the fretboard diagram. This is just to match the orientation I see elsewhere like in a book.

ambewas 1 year ago | |

I totally agree, in fact feature number one is already planned. It'll probably be in the form of a chord schema generator and player that also shows you which scales and roots/thirds... you can use in a given chord.

For 2, it's possible to flip the fretboard to a lefty guitar. Is that what you are looking for? You can find the option under settings. Or do you mean flipping it vertically?

alok-g 1 year ago | | |

Vertically as well as 90 degrees.

https://www.google.com/search?output=search&q=Chords

See how most images are showing chords. The fret is laid out vertically. I've been using those and can thereby read that more naturally.

sentientmachin3 1 year ago |

Looks pretty sick, expecially for lazy ass guitarists (like me) that do not want to build the scales using the intervals.

ambewas 1 year ago | |

thanks! I found that even just lazily continually looking and playing the scales and the positions while building the tool actually also really helped with learning more myself :)

nikodotio 1 year ago |

Wow, I built almost the same thing to learn clojure, but without the sheen and professionalism of yours!

Mine can also handle banjos

https://niko.io/projects/scales/out/index.html

ambewas 1 year ago | |

Very cool! I like the non standard fretting as well. Neat feature

namanyayg 1 year ago |

congrats on the launch, it looks so beautiful

i've been teaching myself the guitar for a couple of years and I'm wondering how to use this tool: for what use cases do you refer to a scale chart?

Till now, i have committed a few scale patterns to memory and i derive the rest when i want to improvise

ambewas 1 year ago | |

Thank you!

This might be a biased opinion, because it's how I do it and it works for me (ymmv), but I think starting with for example the major scale patterns in 3NPS is a great foundation. Once you know this by heart, and especially have learned the relative degrees of all the frets in the pattern, it becomes easier to learn a different scale formula relative to this major scale.

For example, when learning the myxolidian mode, I might go: "oh, but that's just the major scale with a lowered 7th degree!" And then I can apply that pattern easily on the fretboard.

Now, as for why this tool is useful (to me at least): it's really quick to visualise a position in a certain scale in a certain key, and show the note degrees (it's the "roman notation" setting). Especially for really exotic scales that have a lot of differences to the major scale (e.g. messiaen's modes), it is very useful to have a visual aid in front of me while playing.

FretLabs 1 year ago |

Very cool!

About to go live with a similar tool but it renders a dynamic fretboard while listening to songs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8709yXI82ms

ambewas 1 year ago | |

Oh nice, that looks really cool! How did you get the fretboard to sync up with those songs? Ai or some manual encoding work somehow?

Well done!

littlekey 1 year ago |

Thanks for building this! I've always been intimidated looking at the fretboard, it just seems so alien and complicated compared to piano keys etc. This might encourage me to give it another go.

ambewas 1 year ago | |

Definitely go for it! And let me know how I can help you to make it a little bit less overwhelming

apercu 1 year ago |

Simple and works. The CAGED Scale visualizer is a nice touch.

ambewas 1 year ago | |

thanks!

alexsohn1126 1 year ago |

Holy crap, I was about to ask for an alternate tuning options but you already have it in the website!

Awesome website overall, I will share it to everyone I know who plays guitar :)

ambewas 1 year ago | |

Thanks a lot for sharing!

Yeah, I love the tuning option myself!