AudioTheory Guitars News

Today’s update includes a few miscellaneous bug fixes and two brand new features – exact chord playback and play buttons on the full screen scale selector to preview how each scale sounds.



Exact Chord Playback

Version 1.5.0 introduced octave fretboard playback; note highlighting at the specific octave on the fretboard. This has been extended to cover chords, and renamed in the settings simply to 'playback' to reflect the change. The two options for this are as follows:

Global

All instances of a pressed note are highlighted across the diagrams

Exact

The specific instance of a note is highlighted across the diagrams. For the keyboard/ fretboard this will be the note at the selected octave. For chords, this is the note at the point it is played within the chord. This is great for understanding exactly how a chord is to be played, as you can use the 'play' button net to each chord to see an exact visual representation of it highlighted on the fretboard.



Scale Playback

There is now a play button next to each scale preview on the fullscreen scale selector. Press this and the set of scale notes will play through in order, providing an audio preview for how the scale sounds.



Thanks for reading and keep practicing!

Fraser

Our latest update introduces the option to save and load presets, allowing you to store and quickly swap between different layouts.

A saved preset contains all information about the current layout (chords, scale, settings etc.) in a .txt file. These can be shared/ swapped between users and loaded back into the application.

Two new buttons have been added to the configuration – Save and Load. Everything else is handled using your operating system's inbuilt file manager, which you can use to select your own location for saving and loading files.

Presets are stored as human-readable text. You can modify a saved preset using a text editor if you so desire, although do bear in mind that when loading these the line numbers are referenced to map the fields. This means that if you modify these then the file probably won't load correctly! For any line with a disallowed value, a default value is instead loaded into the application.

One final thing is the left handed setting – this is the one setting not stored within the text preset. The idea here is that left and right handed users can share presets and not overtire their existing application setting when loading one of these.

And that concludes today's update. Thanks for listening and keep practicing.

Fraser

Today's update includes two new features for the price of one. Well, technically two for the price of zero ːsteamhappyː. With AudioTheory Guitars version 1.5.0 we've got octave-specific note highlighting and support for Drop D (plus Drop Db) tuning.



Both of these are accessed from the options menu, which is toggled using the cog in the top right of the screen. As the number of available settings has expanded I've split these into two tabs – fretboard playback lives in the 'config.' tab whilst the tunings are located in their own 'tuning' tab.

Drop D

When using a Drop D tuning the rest of the application adjusts to ensure your diagrams and chords are Drop D appropriate. The full list of related changes are as follows:

Open Chords – The open chords have been reviewed for playability and modified where required to use Drop D appropriate variations. Some of the E and G variants are still a little awkward, unfortunately there's no way around this.

Power Chords – Probably the biggest appeal of the tuning, these are now a set of the easy-to-play power chords where you barre the top three strings.

Barre Chords – These have been replaced with a more-suitable set of sus2 chords



Octave Specific Playback

There's a new setting found under the heading 'fretboard playback' and it's got two options; 'global' and 'octave'. Here's what they both do:

Global – This setting keeps playback as it was prior to today's update. When you press a note either on the keyboard or fretboard, all instances of that note are highlighted.

Octave – Our new alternative playback mode. When you press a note (keyboard or fretboard) it is only highlighted in instances where it exists at the same octave.

Octave playback is a really useful setting for getting an exact match between what you are playing on the guitar relative to the keyboard (or vice versa). Do bear in mind though that the octave settings you can apply might result in notes playing back outside the visible range on the keyboard. If the notes you're playing aren't coming up, you probably need to review the octave setting you're using, and unless you're working with the highest guitar notes, it's best to use an octave value of '1' with this setting.



Thanks for reading and keep practicing!

Fraser

Today's update is all about scales. Well, it's mostly about scales. There's also a new options menu, but let's cover the exciting stuff first. AudioTheory Guitars 1.4.0 introduces presets for all pentatonic and blues scales, plus a fullscreen selector to view and select a scale preset.



Presets are accessed through a brand-new quick select popup that's loaded by pressing the 'scale' button in the bottom left part of the screen. The scales are sorted into three tabs and the fullscreen selector can be opened up using the 'all scales' button. This is a a grid of diagrams with mini interactive keyboards, showing all scales side-by side where they can be compared, played and then selected for use with the main interface.



The other big change is the new options cog. This can be pressed to show/ hide the options that display in the top right section of the screen. With more options being added this is a useful way to prevent the screen from getting too cluttered, whilst retaining instant access to the settings if required.



And we also have a brand new setting for controlling the presentation of out of scale notes. Previously these would display across the diagrams in a greyed out format. You can still view them like this, but now you can choose to hide them completely if you prefer.



That's all for this week. Thanks for reading and keep practicing.

Fraser

This week I'm pleased to announce that both barre and power chords are now available as part of the chord selection in AudioTheory Guitars.



This means two new chord sheets, plus a few all-round tweaks to integrate them where they need to be. Here's a rundown of what's changed:

• The 'quick select' popup (opened using the cog icon under each chord) is now tabbed so barre and power chords can easily be accessed
  
• The 'all chords' page (where the chords can be viewed/ selected with diagrams) is also tabbed to view the power and barre chords in this format
  
• The chord box slide-out menu (introduced in version 1.2.0) now contains options to open the barre and power chord sheets, as well as a set of three 'quick load' options to load a set of common open/ power/ barre chords to the chord box
  

One more thing, with the introduction of barre and power chords, there are now chords that don't start at position zero. These wouldn't be viewed in relative terms when using a capo, and if you're using them they won't scale. So everything that starts at zero scales, everything else does not. I'm confident that this keeps everything intuitive when using a mix of open and barre or power chords with a capo.

We also have a couple of smaller miscellaneous new features that have made their way into this update:

• There is now the option to select 'no chord' from the cog popup. This leaves a blank space in the grid, useful if you want to work with less than seven chords on screen.
  
• All chord sheets now display relative to Eb tuning when this is being used.
  

And that's just about everything. Thanks for reading and keep practicing.

Fraser