The instrument figure

Most figures on this site are an instrument with notes drawn on it — a guitar, bass or ukulele neck, a piano, or the ladder (a keyboard with every key the same size). It is the app's own drawing, number for number, and it follows a few rules that hold on every page. Once you know them, every figure reads the same way.

What a note is

Every note is a glyph: a number in a colored face. The number is the note's degree — its distance from the root, counted in the set's own spelling: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 in a major scale; 1, ♭3, 4, 5, ♭7 in a minor pentatonic. The root is the only note that shows its name instead: C, F♯, B♭. So a figure never tells you the name of a 5; it tells you it is a fifth above the root, and which root, and that is the way the app wants you to hear it. The fretboard essay is the one place the labels are names, because that page is about the names.

The color is the degree's, and it is the same color on every page: a 5 is the same color in C major, in A minor pentatonic and in a G7 chord, on a neck, on a keyboard and on a wheel. Twelve colors, one for each distance from the root. When the root changes, every note takes a new number and the color goes with the number — the figure recolors, and that is what a change of key looks like.

On a neck each glyph has a white contour and a second, outer ring in its own color; on a keyboard the whole key tints and the label sits in the lower part of the key.

What a note's state means

A note is drawn in one of a few states, and they mean the same thing everywhere.

• Plain — a note in the set.
• Shrunk — the notes around a chord: the rest of the scale, drawn small so the chord stands out but its context is still there. The Explore loop draws a chord's pentatonic a little smaller than the chord and the rest of the key smaller still.
• Marked — a soft halo in the note's color. A halo means this voicing: the notes of the shape being shown, not every place that chord tone occurs. In the loop it is the target note.
• Gray disc, no number — a note that is deliberately hidden from you: the decoys of Build Shapes, or the walkthrough's notes before it has introduced names and colors. A grayed note still says something is here; it never says which degree.

A chord shape

A chord's voicing is drawn as the app draws it: its positions lit, its root ringed in the root color (the outer stroke — so it reads as this chord's 1 while its color still says where it sits in the scale), any barre as a gray pill across the strings, and an outline joining the notes in string order. On a keyboard the outline is a bridge over the keys. A shape's notes are the marked ones; the scale around it is shrunk.

Some figures narrow to a box — the shape's frets widened to four, with the set inside them and nothing outside. That is the CAGED explorer's view, where the box is the lesson.

What you can do

• Tap a note and it sounds — the app's own sound for that instrument. When a chord's shapes are being shown, a tap on a position picks the shape that holds it; tap again to walk through the others.
• The chips above the drawing are the sets the figure offers, each with its own wheel; the row of roots moves the whole set. On a major mode, Subsets › opens the chords inside it — the nest explorer.
• On a chord, a dropdown picks a family of shapes — basic, useful, inversions — and ‹ › walk through them, the drawing scrolling to each.
• The picker under the drawing changes the instrument; the gear beside it has the tuning and left-handed layout. − and + at the drawing's corner change its size.
• The drawing scrolls sideways; the headstock and body fade out past the edge of the screen. The figure shows every fret — the app's fret limit is a playing limit, not a drawing one.

Everything you set is written into the page's address (#view=…), so any state of any figure is a link you can send.

Where it appears

On every concept page, the lookups, pinned under the guitar essays, as the home page's loop and on the NoSheet page's layered board. The same drawing, the same rules.