Play one open string at a time. The dial fills green and the strobe stops drifting within 5 cents of pitch.
Tap a string to hear its reference pitch.
Detection runs a normalised square difference function over a 4096 sample window, so it tracks the fundamental rather than the loudest harmonic. Low E at 82.41 Hz resolves cleanly. The strobe drifts left when you are flat and right when you are sharp, at a speed set by the size of the error, so it settles before the dial does.
Clicks are scheduled ahead of time against the audio clock rather than the browser timer, so the pulse holds steady while the page is busy. The accent lands on beat one and its lamp turns green.
Tap the outer ring for a major key, the inner ring for a minor. The lit slices either side of your key hold the chords that sit closest to it.
Tap any of them to hear it strummed. Roman numerals in capitals are major, lower case are minor, and the small circle is diminished.
Neighbouring slices share six of seven notes, which is why a key and the two either side of it sound settled together. The inner ring holds each key's relative minor: same notes, different home. Move one slice clockwise and you have modulated to the dominant, the most common key change in popular music.
Tap any chord to open it full size, scroll through the ways to play it, and see what goes with it.
Shapes assume standard tuning. Each chord appears in open position where one exists, then as movable E shape and A shape barres, so the same fingering slides up the neck to any root. Blue dots are the root note.
Drag the neck sideways for frets 8 to 15
Blue dots are root notes. Start and finish on one and the shape will sound like the key rather than a run of notes.
Fifteen frets in standard tuning. The pattern repeats every twelve frets, so anything you learn in the first position works again at the octave. Pentatonic shapes drop the two notes that most often clash over a chord, which is why they are forgiving under a solo.
Tap any fret to name the note. Tap several and it works out the chord.
Drag the neck sideways for frets 8 to 15
Chord naming works from the set of pitch classes you pick, so an inversion comes back as a slash chord: the name of the chord over the note you put in the bass. Two notes are named as an interval instead. Some sets have more than one honest name, and where that happens the alternatives are listed underneath.
Intervals play the lower note first, then the higher one, then both together. Chords arrive as a strum. Roots are chosen at random inside the middle of the guitar's range, so you are naming the distance rather than memorising a pitch.
One lesson is open in this preview. The rest are outlines of where the course goes next.
Every sound here is synthesised on the fly, so there are no samples to load. The kick is a sine wave dropping from 150 Hz to 48 Hz, the snare is filtered noise plus a tuned body, and the cymbals are noise through a high shelf. Jazz and blues run on a triplet grid so the shuffle is real rather than approximated. Patterns are generated for the bar you ask for rather than stored, so the kick keeps landing on the odd pulses and the snare on the even ones however long the bar is. The 8 signatures are compound, counted in dotted beats of three. In 7/8 the count is straight eighths grouped two, two, three, so the two swung styles play straight there.
Fingers are numbered from the index at 1 to the little finger at 4. A T means fret that string with your thumb over the top of the neck, which is how a lot of players take the bass note of an F or a Cadd9.