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What changed · and why it matters

What's new

Every change to Frets, newest first, in plain language. If something here came from feedback you sent, that is not a coincidence.

Every scale, and every mode of it

The catalog went from thirteen scales to forty-four, and the box shapes underneath them were rebuilt to be the fingerings you would find in a method book.
  • Every mode of the major scale, harmonic minor, melodic minor, harmonic major and double harmonic is now in the app, along with the major blues scale, both diminished scales and the augmented scale.Before this you could practice seven of the major scale's modes and two of harmonic minor's. Melodic minor was missing entirely, so there was no lydian dominant and no altered scale. If you came to learn a specific sound, there is now a good chance it is here.
  • The box positions are the real shapes now, not fret rectangles.The box was built by taking every scale note inside a five-fret window, which is not what a box is. The most-played shape in rock guitar, minor pentatonic at the fifth fret, had a fourth note on the G string that does not belong to it, and that shape is the default for A minor. Boxes are now built the way a method book builds them, and the five pentatonic shapes match the published fingerings fret for fret.
  • The number of positions a scale offers is now the number it actually has.Minor pentatonic said six boxes. It has five: the sixth was the first shape an octave higher. Whole tone said six, and all six were the same fingering slid two frets at a time, because that scale repeats itself every two frets.
  • The scale menus are grouped by family, and the drills page tells you when it has no song examples for a scale rather than showing nothing.Forty-four scales in one flat list is unusable. And an empty card that silently disappears looks the same as a page that finished loading.

You can see the shape of a run

Everything here came out of feedback from a guitarist who has been using Frets. Keep it coming.
  • The fretboard now joins the notes of a run into a path, lit behind the playhead and dim ahead of it.You can read the shape of a drill before you play it. A box position looks like a zigzag, three notes per string looks like a staircase, and octave shapes look like a ladder. Watching the trail get drawn also tells you where you are in the run without counting.
  • Slides, hammer-ons, pull-offs and bends are marked on the board, using the same h, p and slash you already read in the tab.The app was already playing a slide as a slide and writing it into the tab, but the fretboard showed it as an ordinary jump between two dots. Now the board and the tab tell you the same story about what your hand is doing.
  • Pausing a drill holds your place instead of moving the page.The setup controls come back when you pause, and the board used to get shoved down the screen, sometimes far enough to disappear. It was different every time, which made it worse. Now the page grows around the board and you keep reading whatever you paused to read. This applies to backing loops and forged riffs too.
  • The diagonal drill plays the whole scale on the way up the neck.It was quietly skipping notes every time it changed strings. In E minor from the nut it missed the A altogether, so you were learning a shape with holes in it while the drill told you it was connecting the neck. It now climbs without leaving anything out.

Frets is live

  • The practice app landed on the site, covering a daily session, the fretboard lab, ear training, the jam page, the rig, and the writing and song benches.It runs entirely in your browser and stores your progress on your own machine. No account, no sign-up, and nothing to install.
Found something broken, or want something it does not do yet? Tell Tristan. The list above is mostly other people's reports.