To help myself learn related positions on the fretboard, I wrote myself a browser tool and have stuffed it onto the web. I've added some stick tunings so thought it warranted a mention here, as I'm finding the tool useful. It's at http://www.fretboardscope.com.

The idea is to help see where this arpeggio fits into that blues scale or mode.. and so on. You get three selectors, so it can overlay up to three things - sort of similar to something I once did with pens and some transparent plastic sheets. Hopefully it's useful to someone else as well, if it is let me know! Cheers - Julian

Julian

That is very cool indeed.

Any chance you could extend it to a longer fretboard?

Peter

I took little dots from the office supply store and could put three scales on my classical guitar simultaneously. That's how I learned the melodic minor, the lydian dominant, and the fifth mode of the harmonic minor.

I feel your dots would be better placed right over the strings instead of between them. For me it's a little disorienting like that.

Also, it might be useful to show the chord fingering which the scale is related to at the same time. Just don't limit which scales that can be placed over what chords. Minor pentatonic, dorian (which is just the minor pentatonic filled in) and the blues scale all have minor thirds which clash with the major thirds of dominant chords as you know but...

Minimally you'd want scales with major sevenths to be able to fit over chords with minor sevenths but also, depending on the situation, you might want to play minor thirds over major seven chords as well because they'd be catching the #9's implied or actually contained in the chord for us fusion nuts.

Yes. Nice tool. Anything to help visualize various patterns can be useful. I second the suggestion above about showing dots on strings. That would be clearer.

An additional suggestion would be to to add in more Stick tunings, especially the more popular ones, i.e.: Baritone Melody, MR, etc.

Nice work and thanks for sharing!

Randy

Cool suggestions - the longer fretboard is possibly the hardest, I just hadn't thought about doing more than an active, but I get it - especially for non-regular tuning like standard guitar, will try to get the logic in sometime.

Circles over the strings instead of gaps is just a styling edit, I think it'll be the first proper use case for the 'theme' dropdown, so I was happy to hear it. The more scales flexibility makes sense to me - I'm wondering if it just means some slash choices, like Am7/Amj7 , Am7/A7 etc - I think those are some shape choices I hadn't contemplated co-existing outside of following changes. You can split the selectors already incidentally (which was meant for following changes), by unclicking the link selectors thingy. But not as friendly as the Am7/Amj7 thing. Thanks for the feedback

Very cool indeed. The single octave doesn't bother me cause I can just start over at fret 1 and think fret 13 if I want to go higher up the neck. The note names/scale degrees in the spaces instead of on the lines also doesn't bother me either and I daresay it'd get kinda messy any other way. What you could do and it would be quite easy is to include baritone melody as one of the tunings offered. I think enough of us guys play that one to include it and it'd be simple. Of course the next step would to cater to the 12 string guys. But hell it's a great reference tool already and can only get better. Thanx for putting that together.

Wow this is a great tool! Thanks man, definitely getting some use out of this!

Very useful. Definitely needs a longer fretboard.

Other suggestions:

Custom vertical lines/dots - this would help me translate it to the fretboard in front of me if it had the same navigational markers

Could we have note letters and numbers at the same time? Whilst the numbers are useful in some contexts, if I'm working off music with chords then the numbers would be useful at the same time.

Export to Excel? Then I could put custom markings and writing on as well for printing out.

The other flexibility you might want to incorporate would be to allow scales that are not based on the chord's root. Gb or G# half-whole scales are in fact used over G7 chords to catch the freaky colors, not just the symmetrical scales built on G, as an example.

Any other scale can be used that way as well especially over dominant and diminished chords although minor chords are quite flexible too in the normal jazz context. But some people also make it their business to push the envelope with major as well so might as well include them.

I don't feel you need to think in terms of slash chords if working on playing melodic lines over chords.

All useful suggestions.. The major/minor chord was thinking along the lines of just expanding to combine them - but maybe it goes past that to more of a "power chord" choice where it doesn't assume more than a 1 and 5,. The whole half/half whole addition is a nice add too. I'll try to get to that and more tunings sooner than later as they're super quick additions