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Comment by markvdb | Hacker News Reader

Professional guitar teacher here.

I had to look for a few minutes myself before this started making some sense. I'm sorry to say that I can't feed to this to my students as it is.

On one hand, it's extremely information dense. All the colors! On the other hand, it seems to lack crucial information that might make it worthwile.

Sorry if that sounds very negative. I do appreciate the effort a lot! And I di see potential to use a further evolution of this in my teaching practice.

P.S. One hint for a small/easy update: include French style note names as an option. They're in use in quite a few more places than you'd think...

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Self-taught (shitty) guitar player here.

The diagram made perfect sense to me. In fact, I sketched a diagram like that when I was practicing playing every scale in every position. First I noticed that each pentatonic scale shape has 2 minor third intervals and 3 major second intervals on five strings (sixth string is always the same as first) and they kind of "loop around". And if you put the five possible shapes side to side in a certain order, they also form a loop. And then I extended that looping pattern to septatonic (major/minor) scale. I don't know if I'm making any sense right now, but it made me instantly memorize all the scales in a way that wasn't explained in any of the guitar tutorials on the Internet I've seen. Until now, I guess.

Sounds like something described here? https://www.guitarmasterclass.net/guitar_forum/index.php?sho...

For septatonic scales I use the following mnemonic: there are 14 notes in 2 octaves and they are distributed among 5 strings. 14=4*3+2 so there's one string with 2 notes and 4 strings with 3 notes. And it always goes like

OO-O

O-O

O-OO

The semitone steps seem to "gravitate" towards the 2-note string. So just loop this pattern around and you get all possible septatonic scale shapes (modulo the offset caused by shorter distance between G and B strings). Also the second note of the two-note string is always a minor scale root.

"I had to look for a few minutes myself before this started making some sense...On one hand, it's extremely information dense. All the colors!"

If you keep the layout, keep all the buttons in place (maybe invisibe or grayed out), and strip down the interface to just one idea, what idea would you use to communicate how to use this tool?

It can be quite intimidating at first I guess. It makes (starts to make) sense once you turn off some shapes and start connecting them together one by one.

I am not sure if you had a look at the "pentanizer" parts, but that one is even worse at first sight, but once you isolate certain parts I think (very subjective) it becomes helpful if you study interval parts.

I have one bit of constructive criticism for you. Every single Major/Minor scale should have exactly one each of ABCDEFG, so that written music makes sense — each line/space corresponds to a "letter", and the key signature tells you how sharp/flat that "letter" is. The tool gets this wrong for example in C# major, where you should have the 3rd step be E# instead of F, and the 7th step to be B# instead of C. A particularly pathological case is D# major, where almost all notes are misnamed — You should have D# E#, F##, G# A# B# C##.

Hi, yes, that's a known issue. I added flat/sharp button as an option, but, I think that makes things even worse. I am working on a fix for this...

Do I have better resources?

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