I built this tool to help me learn the fret board better. The basic idea is that it throws a randomish set of notes at you and keep track of if you are playing them back accurately (the top chart) and consistently (the bottom chart) and give you an indicator without you having to look at the fretboard. My recommendation, and how I’m using it, is to work through each of the “learning the fretboad” sets in order until you at least get it green (95%) if not 100% before moving on to the next one.
Even if you don’t know how to read music there are few enough notes on each string you can probably work out which symbol goes to which note.
One caveat is that I’ve been using it with a direct input straight from the bass. It should work from a miced amp as long as the right tone is the dominant sound but YMMV, especially if you are in a noisy environment or if you have some funky settings on your tone control or amp.
If you look, it warning about “Heuristics: phishing” my best guess would be because the site is brand new. The site doesn’t ask for and you shouldn’t enter any sensitive information.
There is a Google login/register button (because I prefer not to deal with user passwords), but right now, there’s not much reason to log in. The goal is to eventually allow you to track your progress and create more adaptive sets, but for now, logging in isn’t necessary. If you’re even slightly hesitant, feel free to skip it.
The site requests microphone access when you start a play-along so it can hear your playing. I do collect analytics on your performance but do not collect any raw audio. If you’re not logged in, this data is collected anonymously. You can verify this by checking the “Network” tab in your browser to see the requests sent to the back end.
I’m using Google Analytics. I’ll try to add one of those silly cookie popups this weekend, but in the mean time you can opt out of that with Google.
If you have specific concerns please let me know so that I can address them.
@DanW gave a good explanation why this might be a false positive!
I use both Bitdefender and MalwareBytes as well as an additional firewall & antivirus on my router, cause of some sensitive data of some clients on my infrastructure.
This warning came from Malwarebytes, not from the other two.
While I have the policy of never accessing anything that gets flagged, I think it will be perfectly safe for others.
Whoah.
This is a very awesome tool with some very awesome potential!
Great work.
Are there possibilities to build parameters in to the ‘test your mastery’ phase where the note arrays would turn into more logical musical phrases?
I get the random brain-exercise portion, but for reading practice, it would be very cool to have it simulate more musical events too.
The next big features that I’m thinking about is more on the “ear” side… hear a note and play it back, hear a phrase and play it back, hear some chords and play the root and 5th with the kick. That sort of thing.
After that I want to add some standard forms and maybe a song bank to the play along feature. To get there, I’ll need to improve how the tool handles rests and missed notes, so it can go much beyond sight-reading practice. Generating bass lines that make sense musically sounds like an awesome feature, I’ve got some ideas on how to approach it, but it will take some time before I can dive into that.
Sounds excellent.
Too keep it most efficient and practical, I’d recommend building parameters into the phrases so that they start in step wise motion, or contained to a given set of notes (a one octave scale) so that you’re not trying to navigate massive and non-musical leaps.
Such a cool tool, and just the thing I’ve been imagining and thinking on for years to help teach ear training! So cool to see someone with the skills to make it.
I just tried it via my Pixel 9 Pro and it does prompt for mic, and seems to be listening, but I don’t see any progress. I hear the metronome, and I got 100% for E but when I mve on to the next exercise (nexercise?) it doesn’t seem to know what to do.
This site would be great to use over the phone if it could be optimized as such, or make it an app to download.
