AudioTheory Guitars News

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

Hi all,

Another week has passed and another update is now here. This introduces the fullscreen chord selector, which allows you to view all available chords (with diagrams) from a single screen.



This builds on the chord playback functionality introduced in the last update as you can also play all of the chords from this screen. There's even a mini-keyboard at the bottom so you can see the note positions.

You can access this screen in one of two ways. There's now a slide-out menu on the chord box, from here select the 'chord sheets' option. There's also an 'all chords' button on the existing chord selector (the cog icon under each chord) where a new chord can be selected from the fullscreen interface.

To accommodate the new menu a couple of aesthetic changes have been made:

• The 'reset chords' button is now an item in the slide-out menu
  
• The 'play chord' button introduced in version 1.1.0 has been moved under the chord (next to the cog icon)
  

You may notice that there's not currently too much in the slide-out menu, but you can expect this to change soon. More chords are on the way! This update is not just a new interface for viewing and selecting chords, but the foundation for managing a larger library of chords in the future.

Thanks for reading and keep practising.

Fraser

Hi all,

Today we have our first update for AudioTheory Guitars. I'm going to be releasing new features as soon as they are ready, with the intention being for each update to focus on a specific improvement.

The first of these extends the note playback functionality – previously limited to the onscreen keyboard, each note can now also be played by clicking on it in the chord or fretboard diagrams. This is particularly useful when translating from guitar to piano; you can now simply click on your guitar note to see where it sits on the keyboard.



As an extension of this there is now a 'play' button next to each chord. Press this to see your guitar chord mapped onto the keyboard and the corresponding fretboard notes.

That's all for today. Thanks for reading and keep practising.

Fraser