Groove & Scale Practice Website

Wowzer! That is amazing.

Now I just have to work out how to use it…lol

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For starters you can just leave it as it is, press play and have a drumbeat.
I thought the options to be relative self-explanatory but let me know if there’s something specific I can help you with.

Now that I had another look at it and tried to clear my mind / have a fresh perspective: The scale playing time is only connected to how long the scale is shown. It is not in any way connected to the drum loop.
All other sliders are about the drum loop.

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@juli0r, I am sorry about your back. I hope you are able to manage / recover as fast as possible. Once the various parameters (tempo, scale, etc.,) and press ‘Play,’ what am I supposed to see?

When I press Play nothing happens. I do hear the beats, but that’s it. Is there an ideal browser for the website?

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The beat should start and at the top of the website should be a scale/mode shown for a certain amount of time. The amount of time is also an option - the first slider.

There are multiple ways to use this. You can either just play scales to the drumbeat or you can ignore the scales completely and use the groove workout with the silenced bars to keep the groove while the drums are silent.
And of course you can combine those to exercises. Play scales to the groove workout.
Does this explanation help?

Any browser that decently can run JavaScript should work.

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Could be but apart from that you gave me an additional idea for the practice website! With just text you did a very good job but text is probably not the best medium to explain excercises.
Recently @gcancella joined and he develops something I could use so we can create and share excercises on the website.

So I did not have a closer look. I think I have to customize a bit to include fingers into fretting but it’s a good base to start from anyway. Also I am not sure what @gcancella had planned for the future.

I probably won’t get to do that the next few days because my work weekend starts again. Still so far I really like the idea and am excited about it. What do you and others think?

Moved it here because it fits better into the topic. It’s not very pinky specific.

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Sorry to edit my post away while you were typing. As said I realized my post fits more into this thread.

Yes of course a bunch of free exercises exist from different sources. If you know something similar of what I was talking about - an interface to create and share exercises with a specific easy to understand notation then it would really be useless but I haven’t seen such a thing.

I usually spend my time coding when either my fingers as well as my vocal chords deserve some rest or in the middle of the night with my girlfriend sleeping in the room. Sometimes I practice with headphones but it’s a bit of a hassle and my hands already deserve a longer rest.

Also it’s good for me to not get out of practice and I’m learning a lot about music theory as well as Frontend coding by just doing it and I became a programmer because I have fun doing it. And not having someone tell me what to code? Doing what I like to do and experiment with things I want to without time pressure? It’s amazing.

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Your efforts are appreciated. Thank you.

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image

Does this answer your question? :stuck_out_tongue:

Btw, the available link, does not reflect the latest version. This was a relatively private project until I made my introduction post.

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Oh yeah! Amazing idea and project you have going on there.

Hope you are excited as I am to see it in a realistic scenario.

If you make it a little less private I might be willing to contribute anything I adjust for the feature I mentioned.

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Of course! That’s why I’ve started it! eheh

Give me some time to organize some stuff and I’ll give you a github link. You’ll need it anyway to be able to install the package locally.

I’m up to consider going bigger. In addition to exercises I can imagine:

  • interactive games for note finding and other stuff
  • a practice log web app kind of thing with custom goals and other details.
  • riff recorder (how many original riffs have been lost in the depths of your memories? I know I lost some along the way), with audio and some sort of tab
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Those are all great ideas you already had in mind.
The practice log is something that could have interactions with the PracticeTaskList with Timers I have already planned
The riff recorder sounds nice but currently in my mind not worth it in the effort/value calculation.
I just love games and anything that combines practice with gaming in a viable way is great imo!

Sure. No rush. Still got things on my todo anyway and will have to work for 2 1/2 days now so less free time.

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I like that fingering.

I think it would be good to show with the flash card OPTIONALLY. For those learning scales, or modes, or alternate shapes, it is great.

But those that want the flash card to be a flash card, where they need to do modes, shapes, and memorize the fretboard, it’s best to not show those finger position and shapes.

Alternately,there could be a portion of flash cards that show the scale or mode, just like the above example, and the user can “name the scale”. And after the givin (selected) time, the flash card a
Pears with the answer.

Just my take, not sure that you were not already planning this.

I also know that there are apps that do this, but hey, if you like coding it, I like helping With ideas.

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Wow, really useful - thanks very much!

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Love this idea. I will start looking into creating a game prototype for this kind of exercises.


@juli0r About fretful, I’ve been wondering if it would be useful to have tones playing (optionally) when you click a note.

The reason I didn’t yet is because I think I would thread into a world of pain. Not only would I have to refactor a portion of code, and I know myself… I would have to start creating tones from several instruments, because I would always feel it was incomplete.

Maybe as a separate package? Or maybe just having events from the package being handed to the implementers and they would take it from there and do their own sound implementation.

What do you think?


edited for typos

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There’s a lot of possibilities in DAWs that would be possible to do semi-automated. It could always be a synth with a setting for specific instruments instead of a real recording.

Also in the spirit of rapid prototyping and the use we want it for right now I would suggest to keep the notes played for bass. Max bass/piano.

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@juli0r this is an awesome practice tool, thank you for putting in the work! been looking for a convenient way to do the UGW aside from the practice tracks in the course extras.

after using it for a bit, my only constructive suggestion is to change the scale playing time slider to measure in bars rather than seconds. That way the scale display time could line up with the drum beat loop w/ silenced bars, regardless of BPM. I understand this is probably a pain to code though, and it really is super useful as-is!

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Thank you for your feedback! I appreciate the kind words as well as the constructive feedback. Both always welcome.

I thought of simply removing the scale playing timer and directly connect it to the length of one full playthrough of the 42 bars. That would be easier to code because I can just take the length of the audio track as timer.
Do you think that might help?

If someone wants to practice quickly switching scales (for whatever reason - mapping the fretboard/learning it by heart) the timer still might be useful. I could build in another switch with the options “link to drum track length” or “set manually”

I noticed that I have to think about it a bit. If my math isn’t off the length of one bar should be (Drumtracklength(-1s tail) / 42) * 4 so maybe it’s not as hard as you and I initially thougt.

Good suggestion either way!

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@juli0r was that a light bulb moment?
Jamie

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Yes. I made the post, went away and 3 minutes later I was like: “waaait a minute! Length of drumtrack facepalm

So currently clearly my math is off:

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Tadaaaaaaaaaaaaa! :partying_face: :partying_face:
Thanks for your input and giving me something to do while my vocal chords (and/or neighbors) need rest.
Update!

The way it works now:

  • Scale playing time unit now bars in measure
  • First Bar (count-in) ignored
  • Display time resets when drumtrack restarts

I’ll explain the last point a bit more in detail:
So the full track is always 42 bars, removing the first as it isn’t counted we have 41 bars.
If you set the display time to 4 bars then it will be changed for the last bar but when the drumtrack starts again the count is reset so it will only be changed after count-in+4bars.

The example with 4 bars is the ideal one when the display time in bars can is divisible by 40.

If you would set the display time in bars for example to 11 then it would change the last time at bar 33 go through the whole track, restart the track and then change only after count-in+11 bars so since it’s not synchronized with the end of the drumtrack the scale shown in the last set of bars will in fact be shown for 41-33+1+11=20 bars (41-33 = rest at end of drumtrack, 1 = count-in, 11 = scale display duration).

So I would recommend always choosing something that cleanly can divide 40. So 4, 8, 10, 20, 40. If you use the groove workout with silenced bars I would use 4, 8, 20 or 40 so it also syncs up with the silent bars. That’s the way I tested the timing.

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