Fretboard
The neck is the one thing that never moves. Everything else — the sentence, the timeline, the chip bars, the floating tools — arranges itself around it.
Layout
Six strings, low E at the bottom to high e at the top, and 15 frets plus the open position. Fret numbers run along the neck, with the usual inlay frets — 3, 5, 7, 9, 12, 15 — called out so you can find your place at a glance.
The neck fills the width it is given and does not scroll horizontally. If you want a smaller span, use the fret range limiter rather than scrolling.
Marker display bar
Directly above the neck sits a row of chips that changes how markers read. These are the settings you reach for constantly, so they are always visible rather than buried in the sidebar.
| Group | Chips | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Labels | Notes / Intervals / None | Notes prints note names (G, A♯). Intervals prints scale degrees (1, 2, ♭3). None leaves bare dots — useful for testing yourself. |
| Colors | Color / Gray | Color gives each interval its own colour, so a degree is recognisable before you read it. Gray makes every marker the same, which keeps shapes and geometry in focus. |
| Accidentals | ♯ Sharps / ♭ Flats | Whether black-key notes read as F♯ or G♭. Only meaningful when labels show note names, so this group dims — but stays visible — when Labels is set to Intervals or None. |
Each group is radio-style: one chip is lit, and tapping the lit chip does nothing. On a narrow window the bar scrolls sideways instead of wrapping.
Note markers
Markers show which notes belong to the current scale, chord, or triad. Beyond the display bar above, one more control lives in Settings → Fretboard → Markers:
- Shapes — Circles or Intervals. Circles draws every marker the same. Intervals gives each degree its own outline, so the root reads differently from a third even in Gray.
The root note is always emphasised against the other tones.
The interval wheel
With Colors set to Color, a marker’s fill is its distance from the root — the same twelve colours everywhere in the app, so a major third looks like a major third whatever key you are in. Switching the root recolours the whole neck; switching the key does not.
- RootUnison
- Minor 2ndOne semitone
- Major 2ndTwo semitones
- Minor 3rdThree semitones
- Major 3rdFour semitones
- Perfect 4thFive semitones
- TritoneSix semitones
- Perfect 5thSeven semitones
- Minor 6thEight semitones
- Major 6thNine semitones
- Minor 7thTen semitones
- Major 7thEleven semitones
Chord tones are never hidden. When a chord is active alongside a key, notes belonging to the chord stay drawn even if they fall outside the scale. Altered chords, borrowed chords, secondary dominants and slash-bass notes therefore show up as they really are, rather than being filtered out by the key.
Scale timeline
Above the neck, the timeline lays out all twelve semitones in a row. Notes that belong to the current scale are filled in; the rest sit faded. When a chord is active, its tones are marked too, so you can read the chord against its key in one line.
How the structure is drawn is set in Settings → Fretboard → Timeline:
- Brackets — horizontal rails, chord above and scale below.
- Ticks — a baseline with ticks, chord upward and scale downward.
The sidebar shows a one-line description of whichever style is selected, so you do not have to guess which is which.
Play chips
Beside the timeline are up to two playback chips:
- Scale — plays the current scale as a run, following whatever pattern and fret range you have on screen. If the visible range holds no playable notes, the chip says so rather than doing nothing.
- Chord — sustains the current chord.
The Scale chip appears in Scales and Chords modes whenever a scale is selected; the Chord chip appears whenever a chord is active. Press again to stop.
Visual Groupings: overlays and boxes
Directly below the neck, a matching chip bar draws pattern systems over what is already there. Which groups appear depends on the mode you are in.
CAGED
Off / All / C / A / G / E / D. Overlays one of the five CAGED shapes — or all of them at once — on the current scale, chord, or triad. Available in every learning mode.
How a shape is drawn is set in Settings → Fretboard → Shape Overlays → CAGED Display:
- Box — the outline of the shape's region.
- Lines — connecting lines through the shape's notes.
- Both — outline and lines together.
Shapes (pentatonic)
Off / All / 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5. Overlays pentatonic position boxes. In Scales and Triads modes you pick a single position or All; in Chords mode the same five positions are drawn in the context of the selected chord.
3 Notes Per String
Off / 1 … 7. Scales mode only. Draws a pattern with three scale notes on every string. How many patterns exist depends on the scale — a seven-note scale gives seven, and smaller scales offer fewer.
Strings
Off / 123 / 234 / 345 / 456. Triads mode only. Narrows the neck to one set of three adjacent strings so you can work a triad shape without the rest of the neck competing for attention.
Triad boxes
Triads mode, switched on with Show Triad Boxes in Settings: outlines each triad position on the neck.
Chord shapes
In Chords mode, Show Chord Shapes draws real, playable fingerings for the selected chord on the neck, taken from an open chord-fingering database. Three settings shape how they behave:
- Show Finger Numbers — prints which finger plays each note.
- Timeline Shape Cues — marks the shape's tones on the scale timeline as well as the neck.
- CAGED Interaction — decides what happens when chord shapes and CAGED overlays are both switched on:
- Coexist — draw both.
- Exclusive — chord shapes win; CAGED hides while shapes are on.
- Replace CAGED — chord shapes stand in for CAGED entirely, and the CAGED chip group disappears from Visual Groupings.
A legend below the neck names the shapes currently drawn.
Fret range limiter
Turn on Limit Fret Range in Settings → Fretboard → Practice Focus and a range bar appears below the neck. The handles sit on fret boundaries and are full-height, so they are easy to grab.
- Drag the left handle — set the first fret.
- Drag the right handle — set the last fret.
- Drag the track between them — slide the whole window up or down the neck without changing its width.
Vertical marks inside the track show which frets hold at least one visible note, so you can see where the material is before you move the window. The neck dims everything outside the range, and Scale playback follows the range too.
Tap to play
Tap any visible marker to hear that note, using the instrument set in Settings → Audio. On iPad the neck is fully multitouch: hold several notes at once to sound a chord, and slide a finger along the neck to move the sounding note with it. Only visible markers respond, so tapping empty wood stays silent.
Notes light up while they sound — including notes played back by the Scale and Chord chips, and notes recognised by Live Detect, so you can see what you just played.