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Comment by jarek83 | Hacker News Reader

Really nice and useful.

Aside from it, I always wonder why chords are presented in a way that they are never seen when you play it - in this tool in both orientations the fretboard layout never corresponds to what it would look like in the mirror - 0 fret on the left bottom E string at the bottom. It seems that it would make it easier to follow as it would require less 'brain translation'.

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I don't think it requires any translation, as if you just tilt the guitar neck back towards you, this view is the view you'd have of the keyboard. If you had the mirrored translation, you'd always need to mentally flip the chord unless you're playing in front of a mirror.

The only way I can think of to present it as you'd play it would be to implement the notes facing 'away' from you, and have a transparency effect like you're looking through the back of the neck (to make it clear we're talking guitar orientation). Otherwise, the articles' orientation is how you'd see the fretboard if you just tilted the neck towards yourself.

Unless of course, you are left handed, in which case it's mirrored, and hard to follow.

The explanation I've always heard is they want the lower frequency strings to be physically lower than the higher frequency strings. So the low E string is on bottom and the high E string is on top. Also, it helps to know the high E string is numbered string 1 and the low E string is numbered string 6.

I've been playing guitar going on 20 years and I have never thought of or heard of anyone playing guitar in front of a mirror to see what notes their fingers are playing. It's much easier to just turn the fretboard slightly and look at your fingers (which really you only have to do as a beginner).

Yeah, I didn't mean actual playing in front of the mirror, I just changed CSS to show like it is in a mirror and found that it's much simpler to follow the fingers pattern.

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