Show HN: Kord – Python tool for displaying guitar chords/scales on your terminal | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Kord – Python tool for displaying guitar chords/scales on your terminal

github.com

173 pointssynestematic39 comments

Hello HN,

I'm a self taught programmer who would like to share my fretboard visualization tool to any musicians/developers out there. It takes a root note and a scale/chord type as input and outputs a visual representation of your instrument's fretboard on your terminal along with the positions of corresponding notes. The tool supports several scales, modes, chords, instruments and tunings. Try running it with --help to get you started.

The fretboard.py application is actually part of the larger kord music framework I wrote.

It's a PyPI package that allows to do music theory stuff... feel free to read the kord documentation if you want to know more. If you are only interested in the fretboard tool, just scroll to the end of the README. :)

As the kord project grew in complexity I found myself lacking the time to complete it and ATM it's still a bit rough around the edges. The fretboard.py app is a tool that I regularly use and find extremely useful and I thought it would be cool to share it with the world.

I am creating this thread in the hope of: * letting other players make use of the fretboard tool * gathering feedback from programmers on my coding * gathering feedback from musicians on the music theory behind it * allowing collaboration if anyone is interested

Thanks for checking it out!

Looks cool! You asked for feedback, from a quick look:

* I suspect you may have created the IO lib, bestia, to learn and because is fun, but if you use existing libs like Prompt-Toolkit [1] you can focus more time in the actual app vs infrastructure. Also libs like PT can do a lot of heavy lifting and boring stuff for you like enabling cross platform support (Windows!).

* I saw you used .json for tuning configuration, I guess it is ok but perhaps you could just have the tuning be plain python files? Not sure you gain too much by using JSON here.

* Speaking of json... could be interesting to make the _output_ of the app machine readable. So instead of focusing on pretty ANSI output, how would the app look if it generated the fretboards as pure data? One could then write a program to create ANSI or HTML or SVG and whatnot from the same data.

* There are a ton of music theory libraries out there, perhaps you could get some ideas from those. music21 seems to be interesting in this area (although quite heavy / big) [2].

1: https://python-prompt-toolkit.readthedocs.io/

2: http://web.mit.edu/music21/

Thanks for your input. The bestia library I created waaaay before I even started working on kord so at this point I just go with it since I know the API in and out. I'm sure there are other libraries out there doing the same thing better but hey, this one is mine. :)

As for the .json files I thought they would be a good way for non-developer end users to deal with their self created tunings without having to mess with the code itself.

Thanks for the links to the projects, I will try to take a look at them.

I agree they should focus on building products not boilerplate but i would argue "outputting pure data, i.e writing your own data format, is just as much boilerplate.

JSON is fine IMO

Nice idea. I would love to know how the fretboard visualizer works and looks like, but am too lazy to install and run the tool. Could you add an animated gif or at least some screenshots?

Think this must be the fretboard:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/synestematic/bestia/master...

This image (or a text version of it) is absolutely worth including in the README! Edit: I see that it got added to the README 2 minutes ago, nice. :)

hi, I embedded some pics to the README. take a look!

Hi.

I've just had a quick look, and I've already found the fretboard.py app useful. I have a 9-string guitar (low C#, F#, B below the usual strings) which I've never really made much use of, and adding a new tuning to the .json file was easy enough, and straight away I can use it to map things out on the fretboard.

When I get some time, I want to look into using this to produce PDF output for worksheets as it'll be a lot quicker than my current workflow for producing scale diagrams for pupils.

Thanks!

Slightly off topic, but what’s the purpose of anything more than an 8 string? Because at 8 strings, you’re already hitting 2 semitones above the standard bass’ tuning (E standard). At that point, if you want to go lower, why not just use a distorted bass guitar? Maybe I just don’t like the muddiness of the guitar distortion sound of the extremely low notes (bass distortion has a different sound)?

The low notes on guitar simply sound quite different from the low notes on bass, mostly because of the choice of string gauge, scale length, pickup design and amplifiers. Some genres such as progressive metal & djent find those sounds very useful!

For what it's worth, I agree with you, I find the bass frequencies on even standard-range guitars to not be all that useful. In my own music productions, that part of the spectrum belongs almost entirely to the kick drum & bass guitar. However, once you cut out the low-end mud, the rest of the guitar sounds very good!

I originally bought it to use with a loop pedal, so I could play bass, then chords, then solo on top. I've done a tiny bit of that and it's been useful, but I've not really explored it enough to be fully confident all over the neck.

I've played a few gigs with it where I've been swapping between bass and guitar and for that it's been great - tbh the first time I did it I was just doing it to wind up the guitarist I was playing with as he was rather conservative about gear selection, and this was the embodiment of everything he despised!

I bought a stick years ago, but could never get to grips with it (I did a year on it, but was still very basic), and I guess the 9 string filled the gap for that sort of thing, without being unplayable for me... Plus I got it for a steal on gumtree here in the UK as the seller had got so annoyed with no shows he sold it dirt cheap.

Hey, great to see a fellow UK stickist in the wild! My railboard arrived earlier this year. It sure is quite the handful...

I can't say I'm nearly as good as I'd like to be, but I've managed to learn enough to track some basslines and chordal parts.

For anyone new to the Chapman Stick, check out http://stick.com . It is a wonderfully quirky musical instrument.

there are a few reasons. like tiniuclx said, it just sounds different. a downtuned guitar-scale string is going to have a very different tone than a low bass-scale string. like you say, low notes can sound very muddy when distorted. interestingly enough, people usually EQ out most of the low-end frequencies when they play in lower tunings. seems counterintuitive, but it makes for a very interesting sound to my ear.

anyways, the main reason to have extra strings is to have a greater range. if you just want to play very low notes, you can downtune a regular six-string guitar pretty far, you could just get a bass, or you could get a baritone guitar for something in between.

here's an example of a riff that uses almost the entire range of an eight-string guitar: https://youtu.be/v9RIJ4XlUPU?t=66

thanks! I just added 8 string tuning to guitar.json (don't know how I missed it before...)

Very cool project. I particularly like fretboard.py, I'm a sucker for charming command line tools like this. For what it's worth, I have a bachelor's in classical guitar and I taught guitar for 6 years. It would be cool if you could get a single form of a scale instead of an entire fretboard of scale notes, and maybe even limit it to some number of octaves. It would be useful to generate scale charts for students one piece at a time.

Hi, just letting you know I've added a -d option that might be great for teachers as it displays degree numbers instead of actual notes

I just checked it out, very cool! Thanks for taking my idea into consideration.

that is a neat idea, I'm a bit concerned about the command line options becoming too contrived in order to handle such a high degree of precision. I will defintly keep it in mind though

Awesome project! In terms of getting people excited about it, embedding a screenshot or two in the README would go a long way, I think. Congrats on shipping!

thanks for the advice, I've added a couple

Neat! From the PyPi listing here's the github repo. https://github.com/synestematic/kord.

I am working on a similar project called Harmony Explorer [0], which was spawned out of how challenging I find it to remember note names of chords and to figure out chord names when using a capo on guitar. Harmony Explorer also lets you listen to the chords, not just view them.

It is interesting to see how similar our approaches to note algebra is. While my project is written in Rust, it looks like we calculate note names in a very similar way [1].

I also really like the way you are handling accidentals - by storing accidentals including double-sharps and double-flats alongside the notes. I am using a global variable which picks between using sharps or flats when showing accidentals - works fine for now but definitely does not cover all use cases. I'll see if your approach can solve some of the problems I've encountered.

Thank you again for sharing, I feel like I learned many useful things from just a cursory glance at Kord. Likewise, I hope you find Harmony Explorer interesting!

[0] https://github.com/tiniuclx/harmony-explorer

[1] https://github.com/tiniuclx/harmony-explorer/blob/master/src...

That looks interesting! I have been looking into learning Rust for some time now, maybe I will take your project as a starting point. :)

Message me on Twitter (@tiniuclx) if you have any questions!

Cool. A few months ago there was a show HN about a React component for guitar visualization [1], and at least 5 other people jumped in with their similar tools in the comments.

Those were almost all web-based, with only one fairly limited, somewhat meh command line tool. It's nice to see a more general and extensive command line tool.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23921478

Hey, this is really cool! I like how the interfaces are exposed to allow folks to build other music tools with it.

I have a project with some similar features, written in Perl: https://github.com/whofferbert/key-mode

Mine has a few other features like progression generators and some tools to show keyboard type instruments as well, but is lacking some of the neat things your tool has, like the pure chord visualizer.

Perhaps when I have some free time, I will try to contribute some progression building logic to your project.

In a similar thread, I made a Python command line tool which tells you what chord you're playing---either on guitar, or on any other stringed instrument (with custom tunings too!).

This was an experimental, proof-of-concept project, but some of you here may enjoy it :)

https://github.com/jessebrennan/chordnamer

> kord is a python framework

Thanks, I guess!

This is awesome:

  >>> n1 = MusicNote('F', '#', 5)
  >>> n2 = MusicNote('G', 'b', 5)
  >>> n1, n2
  (F⁵, G⁵)
  >>> n1 == n2
  True

I think the flat and sharp unicode characters are removed in this message board

I wonder how many thousands of us started doing something like this https://github.com/adnmcq/music_visualizer

I did! https://github.com/alexpana/fretsonjs

So many good musicians/developers out there :)

for computer and guitar fans: search for midi guitar

http://jamorigin.com/products/midi-guitar

pm me please

You might be infringing a trademark - KORD.

You mean this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kord_machine_gun ? I thought the name sounded familiar... but actually it was because I read about the Russian N1 would-be moon rocket recently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N1_(rocket)#Engine_control_sys...

Sorry I mistook it with Korg Synthesizers. Please ignore, apologies.

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