Fretboard explorer
Scales, on the
actual neck.
Pick a key and a scale and see it drawn across all twenty-two frets, with every interval labelled. Isolate a position, change the tuning, hear it played, and see which chords fall out of it.
Notes
—
Intervals
—
Step pattern
—
Also known as
—
Chords in this key
Build a chord on each degree of the scale using only notes from the scale, and these are what you get. This is why certain chords sound like they belong together.
How to actually use this
Staring at a whole neck of dots teaches you almost nothing. The dots become useful the moment you constrain them.
Work one position at a time
Set the position selector to a five-fret window and learn only that box until your hand finds it without looking. Then move to the next window and — this is the part people skip — practise moving between the two. Players who know five boxes but cannot cross between them are stuck in five separate prisons.
Watch the root notes, not the shape
Switch the labels to scale degrees and notice where the amber dots sit. If you know where the root is on the sixth and fifth strings, you can move any shape to any key without thinking about it. That single piece of knowledge is worth more than memorising three more scales.
Play the intervals, not the pattern
Running a scale up and down builds speed and nothing else. Instead, play from the root to the third and back. Then root to fifth. Then root to seventh. You are training your ear to recognise distances, which is the skill that lets you play what you hear instead of what your fingers already know.
One scale, seven names. The major scale and its six modes contain exactly the same notes. What changes is which note you treat as home. Set the root to C with the major scale, then set the root to A with natural minor — identical dots. The mode is created by the bass note and the chords underneath, not by the notes you pick.
Where to start if you are new
Minor pentatonic first, in one position. Five notes, no wrong-sounding ones, and it covers most of blues and rock. Add the flat fifth to make it the blues scale. Only after that is genuinely automatic should you go anywhere near modes — learning Lydian before you can improvise a phrase in A minor pentatonic is like buying a second guitar before you can tune the first.