February 2016 version 4.3
Table of Contents February 2016 version 4.3 ........................................................................................................................................ 1 Overview ........................................................................................................................................................................... 6 SightReader ....................................................................................................................................................................... 7 Keysignature ................................................................................................................................................................. 8 Selected note jump ....................................................................................................................................................... 8 Swing 8th off/ on ............................................................................................................................................................ 8 Time signatures ............................................................................................................................................................. 9 Presets........................................................................................................................................................................... 9 Deep Rhythmic editing .................................................................................................................................................. 9 Clean fretboard ............................................................................................................................................................. 9 Note Rhythm selections ................................................................................................................................................ 9 Chord Options ............................................................................................................................................................... 9 Accidentals .................................................................................................................................................................. 10 The Guitar Neck .......................................................................................................................................................... 10 The Menu .................................................................................................................................................................... 10 The Deep Rhythm Editing Tools .................................................................................................................................. 11 The SightReader Music Window ..................................................................................................................................... 12 Sight-reading Primer ....................................................................................................................................................... 13 Chords ......................................................................................................................................................................... 13 Credit where credit is due. .......................................................................................................................................... 14 The Main Window Menu ................................................................................................................................................ 15 Registration and activation ......................................................................................................................................... 15 Activation ................................................................................................................................................................ 16 Install ....................................................................................................................................................................... 16 Backup Everything and Import.................................................................................................................................... 16 Tips and Tricks ............................................................................................................................................................. 17 Help videos .................................................................................................................................................................. 17 Lessons ............................................................................................................................................................................ 18 The Browser .................................................................................................................................................................... 18 Transcriber ...................................................................................................................................................................... 19 Export to lick library .................................................................................................................................................... 20 The Metronome .............................................................................................................................................................. 21 Basic features .............................................................................................................................................................. 21 The Splitter .................................................................................................................................................................. 21 The Bass Movement Tool............................................................................................................................................ 22 The Chord Player ......................................................................................................................................................... 22 Random tempo ........................................................................................................................................................... 22
Record Control ............................................................................................................................................................ 22 Tempo advice .............................................................................................................................................................. 23 The Invertor .................................................................................................................................................................... 24 The sequences: ........................................................................................................................................................... 25 Selecting notes ............................................................................................................................................................ 25 Button Files ................................................................................................................................................................. 26 Free form..................................................................................................................................................................... 26 Export to Neck Builder ................................................................................................................................................ 28 QuickChords .................................................................................................................................................................... 29 Chords with Scales ...................................................................................................................................................... 30 Pluralities..................................................................................................................................................................... 32 Output ......................................................................................................................................................................... 32 Just Scales ............................................................................................................................................................... 33 Chord Library ................................................................................................................................................................... 35 The edit window ......................................................................................................................................................... 36 Layout.......................................................................................................................................................................... 36 Text.............................................................................................................................................................................. 36 The Menu .................................................................................................................................................................... 37 Guitar SightReader Clipboard ..................................................................................................................................... 37 The Recorder ................................................................................................................................................................... 38 Audio ........................................................................................................................................................................... 38 Lick Library ...................................................................................................................................................................... 39 Eartraining....................................................................................................................................................................... 47 Interval Testing ............................................................................................................................................................... 49 Chord and Scales Test ................................................................................................................................................. 49 Melodies for Intervals ................................................................................................................................................. 50 Interval over Bass ........................................................................................................................................................ 50 Melody Movement ..................................................................................................................................................... 51 Note match ................................................................................................................................................................. 51 Random Note .............................................................................................................................................................. 52 Library Perfect Pitch ................................................................................................................................................... 52 Perfect pitch method .................................................................................................................................................. 53 Progression Recognition ............................................................................................................................................. 53 Tempo Recognition ..................................................................................................................................................... 55 Progression Center .......................................................................................................................................................... 56 The Progression Creator ............................................................................................................................................. 56 The Progression Player................................................................................................................................................ 58 Add/Edit Chords .............................................................................................................................................................. 59
Add/Edit Scales ............................................................................................................................................................... 60 Practice Scheduler ........................................................................................................................................................... 61 Creating a practice schedule ....................................................................................................................................... 62 More Tools ...................................................................................................................................................................... 63 Exam Creator and Tester ................................................................................................................................................ 63 To Create an Exam ...................................................................................................................................................... 64 Community Content ........................................................................................................................................................ 65 Setlist Manager ............................................................................................................................................................... 66 Neck Builder .................................................................................................................................................................... 67 Learning the Fretboard ................................................................................................................................................... 73 The circle of 4ths ......................................................................................................................................................... 73 Spelling ............................................................................................................................................................................ 74 Chord Spellings ............................................................................................................................................................ 75 Chord Shorthand ............................................................................................................................................................. 75 Final tips .......................................................................................................................................................................... 76
Foreword Hi! Welcome to Guitar SightReader Toolbox – the most killer guitar and bass training software on the planet! My name is Sean Clancy and I’ve been making guitar software since 1991. Back in 2001, I thought I would like to work on my sight-reading. I scoured the net looking for such software. There were a handful of piano based sightreading apps around but nothing for guitar. So I made my own. It started with SightReader (guitar) and then I progressed further with these apps: • •
Bass SightReader
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Guitar freak toolbox Guitar SightReader Master
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Guitar Freak Workstation with SightReader Master Extreme
All of this culminated in Guitar SightReader Toolbox. These previous applications were limited to Windows. I learnt a new programming language and after 5 years of work, Guitar SightReader Toolbox was launched for both Windows and Mac. I’m adding new tools from time to time. At the time of writing this, I have 1 in development and 1 in my mind that I’ll be adding. As Guitar SightReader Toolbox is license based, this means you can upgrade your computer, reformat the hard drive and your license will recognize your computer without having to dredge up password keys or track me down. However, I am very trackable, and I will answer any questions, take notice of any bugs (I’m the only programmer, so bugs can happen) and even skype with you if you need help! All this tools were on my wish list for things that I would’ve liked when I was starting to play. They all work not only for Guitar, but also 4, 5 and 6 string Bass. It’s granted that you may not use all the tools right away – but whenever you want to work on any area of your playing or musicianship, there’s a tool here to help! I myself have been a musician and playing guitar for most of my life. Most of those years I have been giving guitar lessons and clinics, toured the world and accumulated over 10.5 millon views on YouTube. I poured myself into this software and I wish you the very best in your musical pursuit. Best regards, Sean Clancy
[email protected]
Overview
Overview 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
SightReader Sight-reading Primer Instrument Selector The Main Menu Lessons (videos) Go to www.guitar-sightreader.com Open the transcriber The Metronome The Invertor QuickChords
And number 21 will open more tools •
Exam Creator
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Community Content
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Setlist manager
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Neck Builder
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Guitar Change Runner
11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.
Chord Libraries The recorder The Lick Library Ear training (10 different tools) Tuner Progression creator and Progression Player Edit and add chords Edit and add scales The practice Scheduler The Worksheet
SightReader Many players are interested in reading music. After all, most other instruments can do this and it opens a player to a brand new world of music. However, guitar players, and to a lesser extent, bass players, are notoriously bad at this. You could solve this by buying a ton of sheet music and reading it (which is always a good thing to do). The only problem is that reading a piece over and over again will lead to muscle memory. The SightReader addresses this tool by providing new sight-reading material at the press of a button. Best of all, you can customize it in order to work on the things you want to work on as well as restricting it so you can actually get through it.
Let’s look at the SightReader Option Window on the next page:
On the left we have the option to choose our key signature, Scale, How far the notes can jump, swing setting and time signatures. On the top middle, we have presets that we can choose and make, access deep rhythmic controls and clear the fretboard. Below that we have note controls and below that we have the controls for ties, chords and accidentals (sharps and flats). The blue buttons control how often that thing will appear in the music. On the guitar fretboard, I’ve chosen some notes. I could do this individually or just mouse-drag over a section and select all the notes in that drag motion.
Keysignature We can set a keysignature i.e. G major. In G Major, you’re going to see all the notes in that key on the fretboard. In G major, whenever you see an F or a C, you’re going to play them as a sharp. (see this link in Wikiedia to learn more about this). When you choose the Blank Keysignature, you’re going to see the sharp symbols before F and C. The scale function will enable you to choose a particular scale (With the root of the keysignature chosen) to use. You may want to choose chromatic if you want complete control over which notes you want to choose on the fretboard.
Selected note jump This will set the jump between notes. We can choose random (any notes chosen at any time), or we can create a sense of order using the combo box. If we choose 3 notes away, the jump could be 1 note away, 2 notes away or 3 notes away. You have up to 7 notes away.
Swing 8th off/ on In jazz, 8ths notes are often swung. In this setting, two 8ths notes will sound like 2 scud missiles going off one after each other, but sound like a triplet where the first note holds for the first 2 notes and the last note is shorter, just for the length of the last note of the triplet (see wikipedia here for this).
Time signatures Choose which ever time signature you would like to work on. For more on time signatures, here’s wikipedia again
Presets If you are working on something, you can save it as a preset here. Just type a name for it in the text box at the bottom of the tool and press the plus icon. It will now appear as a preset in the preset box. To open your preset, or any other of the ones you have, or downloaded from community downloads, select a preset and press the triangle with load on it. To delete a preset, select a preset and press the circle with the minus sign in it.
Deep Rhythmic editing See at the end of this section
Clean fretboard This will wipe the note selections off the fretboard. Choosing a new key signature or scale will also do this too.
Note Rhythm selections Here’s where you choose which rhythms the notes will take in your music. Pressing the blue notes will cycle these: •
None
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Rarely
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Average
•
Often
This work the same for any of the other settings with these blue notes The rhythms actually are presets that affect the deep rhythmic settings. You can set more control over those in the Deep Rhythmic editing page. Ties are lines that tie one note length to the next. In 4/4 there is a natural invisible bar-line between the 2 and 3 beats. If a note crosses over that value, a tie will automatically appear (to make it easier to read). Setting the tie control to something other than “none” will mean that ties will appear in other parts of the music.
Chord Options Chord options are chart chords (chords that appear above the music) and notation chords (chords in music notation). You can open the tools for each of these by clicking on the actual text (“Chart Chords” or “Notation Chords”). Chart chords are pretty self-explanatory. I added this feature as playing a gig in a big band, most certainly on a cruise ship, they will give you a chart where you have to play the chords, but with the top note being the single note in the music (brutal eh?). I would printout the chord library “Robert Conti Melody chords” for chord voicings to get this down.
Notation Chords will use chord libraries for the source material for the notes that will appear. You just drag them into the top box. You can also right-click on the chord libraries to see them.
Accidentals Here you can choose sharps or flats, or include double sharps and double flats. These doubles are definitely not for the faint-hearted. A double sharp of C (or CX) would be D. A double flat of C (Cbb) would be Bb.
The Guitar Neck First of all, this example uses a guitar neck, but you can choose also bass (4, 5 and 6 string bass). The clef that will appear in your music as a bass player will be a bass clef. The notes that you can choose on the fretboard will have orange note names on them. You cannot choose notes without the text. But you can organize any combination you like between the key signature and the scales settings. Like I said, you can choose notes individually or drag over a section to grab a whole bunch of notes and then fine tune it by turning notes on or off. If you are planning to use chord notation, you will need to do a new selection after choosing your neck notes
The Menu
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Instrument sets your instrument. You can also choose this from the main window.
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SightReading Mode allows you to choose 2 bars (default), 4 bars or 16 bars of music.
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Export/import allows you send and get imports of presets to and from the export folder or the web.
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Pitch choice allows you o
Music written for Guitar. Guitar and Bass are transposing instruments, which means that the music you play from reading music will sound one octave lower than if you play it on a concert pitch instrument like a piano.
•
o
Concert pitch. What you would do is play your selection of notes 12 notes (an octave) above your
o
note selection. A Bass plays for Guitar Chord Charts. It’s a little rudimentary but useful for some.
Guitar Sounds give you different instrument sounds. The graphic designer of my software is a flute player, so I made the option here to choose many different instrument sounds during playback.
•
Help – a video to show you how to set it up in pictures and sound.
The Deep Rhythm Editing Tools Here’s where the deep rhythmic control goes on. When opened, you get this window. If you click on any of the rhythms, it’ll play for you these rhythms. The note used is the note C (which is a great note to play back in your mind for a form of absolute pitch). This is really useful as getting to know what a rhythm looks like associated with how it sounds is half the battle. Press “S” and you get all the options available Here you get the more refined option to select specific rhythmic figures… for example: If you want your 8th notes in groups of 2 rather than groups of 4, you can select that with this window.
So that’s how you set up your options. As you can see, you can totally set the music to whatever level you like – or set it up to work on your sight-reading weakness so they can become strengths.
Our next stop? The SightReader Music window. This happens when we click this button
The SightReader Music Window The SightReader music window is very straight forward. Pressing the button or the corresponding key “g” will generate a new piece of music based of the settings in the previous options window. You can change the tempo by “,” = down by ten “.” = up by ten. These keys also have a “<” and a “>” usually on the same key pads. Space can used to play or stop. “M” starts playing the metronome. It also turn off the metronome. This is useful if you want to work out the music before playing along. The play, stop and pause buttons are self-explanatory. The gear button will take you back to the options. “P” will print your music onto your printer. Great for taking your music on the run or for students! Here are the 3 SightReader modes 2 bar music
4 bar music
16 bar music
It is important to notice the button next to the printer button… Two bar. “W” will play both bars. “1” will play just bar 1. “2” will play just bar 2.
Four bars. “W” will play both bars. Like above, number keys will play the corresponding bars.
16 bars. This is a little different. 1-8 key pads will play the corresponding staves (which are 2 bars each). Playing from any of these staves will play all the way to the end of the music. Use the play button (or space) to play the whole 16 bars.
Finally, reading music is hard not because of playing the right notes, or playing the right rhythms. It’s hard because you have to play them together. Get familiar with notes and rhythms. Then don’t forget to play it so it sounds musical!
Sight-reading Primer Do you want to learn the notes on your fretboard? Are you new to sight-reading? Are you next level and wanting to work on reading chords? The Sight-reading Primer is for you! Here we see a 5 string bass. There is a yellow line. This sets the frets where the notes can be found. This can be set by using the “Lowest Fret” list or the “Highest Fret” list. You can also click next to the fretboard to set the highest fret and right-click (cmd+click on Mac) to set the lowest fret. We also see that all strings (B,E,A,D,G) are enabled so it can happen on any string. We have selected the Aeolian scale (natural minor scale). I have clicked generate and we see a note. Press space again and we will see…
Then we can press space and that will generate a new note. The method… 1. Generate (this needs to happen the first time around after setting new keys, instrument and scale) 2. Find the note on your instrument 3. Press space to see the note 4. The position on the neck is not really important. You looking for the match between the sound of your instrument and the note played by your computer. 5. Repeat
Chords I’ve changed to guitar as I’ve made a lot more chord libraries for guitar than bass. I’ve changed from single note to chords (just click on the dial to change it. I’m in C major and I’ve dragged Robert Conti Melody Chords and Cool Chords in to the chosen Libraries. These chord libraries are where the shapes will be chosen from.
I’ll press generate (this may take a while as creating a whole list of chords is a lot more different than single notes)
Here we have our chord…
We have these notes from the top going down… D B
G A Press space and we get…
A11 is our chord! We can see it and hear it! So, just repeat the same steps as the single note method above and you’ll start getting some real results! If you can read chords, single notes will be a cinch!
Credit where credit is due. I was inspired into making these sight-reading tools by studio great Tommy Tedescoe. He wrote a book called “For Guitar Players Only”. He was a great sight-reader and had some fantastic exercises in his book. Unfortunately, I realized that, although they were great, I had just memorized them. Basically I needed some more material. Hence, that was the kernel of the idea for the sight-reading stuff. I get emails telling me how music students are passing exams because of my software and that make me feel great! However, recently I heard of another company trying to pass themselves off as SightReader… They’re basically a flash card system. I wrote to them and as far as I know, they are still trying this stunt. I saw their rude flash card app and decided that I would destroy it with this one tool… and I think that this tool speaks for itself!
The Main Window Menu
There’s a lot going on in this menu. •
Vital inbuilt installs you need to do
•
Registration and activation
•
Setting up audio (crucial because you might end up with a crash)
• •
Check for updates Help videos
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Mass Backup
And other things…
Registration and activation Guitar SightReader Toolbox comes with 10 days free trial. This is so you can see and try out all the tools! Once you agree that there is nothing like it, you may want to go ahead get some licenses. The standard license is $79.99 USD. This is for one computer – but I also create an additional license and a bonus as lots of people want it on their desktop and laptop. There are other bundles but the standard license seems to be most popular. Buying licenses used to be automated – and maybe one day in the future it may be again – but I find dealing with customers personally far better. There is a whole video on registration at www.guitar-sightreader.com Anyway – here’s how it works. In the software, you go to the Registration Menu, click on it and select Get licenses. After filling this in, you will get taken to a true PayPal site with all the things you expect from PayPal… Once you’ve paid into PayPal, an email gets sent to me. I’m in New Zealand, so there may be a little bit of a wait before I check the email (for example I might be asleep when it arrives). But as soon as I get it I will generate 2 licenses for you and send you an email to let you know you’re ready to activate!
Activation Once you have your licenses, you are free to apply your license to any computers you want to. It doesn’t matter whether they’re Windows or Mac. Go to the Registration Menu, click on it and select Activate your computer Enter in your email that you used to register the computer. Fill in the second field (it can be anything at all). Press activate and you will get sent an email from
[email protected]
It’s really important that you add this to your contacts otherwise it may end up in the spam folder. Click on the link in your email and you will go to a webpage which says your software is activated. You have 48 hours to do this. Restart Guitar SightReader and enjoy. The great thing is that if you upgrade your operating system or reformat your hard drive, just activate and your license will recognize your computer and automatically activate it (you will need to restart GSRT again). Important: I do not sell or give any of your contact details to any 3rd party. If you have any problems, I can help you. Just email me at
[email protected]. I can activate your software from my side if you have activated it from your side and haven’t received the email. Install When you start Guitar SightReader Toolbox for the first time, you’ll get presented with a window called vital installs. For the windows version, you’ll need to install Open AL (it’s a very small audio system), QuickTime (Almost all the audio in GSRT uses the QuickTime engine – when I ever get some decent money for the software, I will change it so we don’t need QuickTime) and Java (which is what I use to create the beautiful musical notation). For Apple, we only need to install Open AL. I know that some people will consider it bloatware – but as of this date, I couldn’t figure out a way to install these things without you, the user doing it. However, this first page contains internal links to all the installers and they can even be installed offline.
Backup Everything and Import
Sometimes, you may have to completely reinstall everything. If so, you will lose all the presets you so cleverly made. You may have added some new scales or chords – or have some chord libraries you want to hold onto to.
Before you press the nuke button to reformat your hard drive, Go to Tools on the main menu and click on Backup Everything. This (if you haven’t got it already) will back up your data files to a folder called
Guitar SightReader Toolbox exports. Save that folder to a pen drive and then reformat. Afterwards, put it back on your desktop (after reinstalling GSRT) and Go to Tools >Import Backup. Navigate to the folder and you’ll see a corresponding folder there to import.
Tips and Tricks This will be a section where I will post videos showing ways I use GSRT and ideas behind them.
Help videos All the help (aside from this manual) are in video form. You will need Adobe Flash Player to view these. You can install this from the main menu > help
Lessons Included in Guitar SightReader Toolbox are lessons. Videos on musicianship are ongoing and there is a wealth of information here.
Notice that there is download feature to the bottom left of the video. Here you can download the material for the lesson. The lesson window may take a couple of seconds to load as it streams via the web.
The Browser This will open up your web browser to my site www.guitar-sightreader.com There are a bunch of articles and interesting stuff to check out. The articles are on sight-reading and other things I discovered I could do after playing around with my own software! There is a blog and links to other software that works great with Guitar SightReader Toolbox. There is also a free jazz course available on my site. This is going to cover all the things we covered at Jazz University at the New Zealand School of music.
Transcriber
What ultimate guitar and bass training software would be without a tool to change the speed of music without changing the pitch? After you’ve loaded your music file, or chosen a tune from the recently played files, you get a wave image. Clicking on the wave image will set a start point and right-clicking (or ctrl+click on Mac) will set your end point. This is good for working on certain parts of a tune. It’s spacebar to start and stop. I made a bookmark here called solo which will load when you now choose this song. You can use the slider to speed up or slow down the music. If you click on the numbers above the slide, the speed will click right to those. The comma and full-stop keys will speed up and slow down 5% - so you can build up to playing your tune at full speed. You can see a tap tempo on the grey area. If you click on that in time with the song, it will set the tempo. The metronome will also match to that tempo. When you slow down and speed up the music, the metronome will follow the change. However, a powerful feature is the ability to record yourself through your computer’s microphone and check if you are really nailing the part. Being a good player means listening to yourself play and seeing what you can improve on. The guitar is a very physical instrument and sometimes we can’t listen to ourselves objectively. You can also speed up and slow down your own recording so you can check for good articulation or what it would sound like faster!
Export to lick library Find a lick in the song you like? Export it to a lick library. I have personally gone through whole albums of my favourite players and compiled my favourite licks into lick libraries for later study and transcribing with Guitar Pro. Fill in the export text field and press export selection to lick library and you’ll get the following window:
All your lick libraries are selectable in that combo box under that blue window. This is where your lick will end up. Cool eh? There will be more on the lick library tool in this manual – but I wanted to let you know about this feature. The Setlist tool (in more tools) will also let you export to the transcriber.
The Metronome This is the best possible metronome possible. I thought very, very carefully about this tool and compiled a wish-list of what I wanted it to do.
Basic features
First of all, it’s movable, so you can drag it anywhere on the screen. You’ve got the self-explanatory controls. The metronome is based on ¼ notes (or crotchets). The time signature here is 4/4. If you hover over those numbers, they will change colour and you can use your up and down arrow to change their values. Here I have changed it 6/8. This means that it will play beats twice as fast as 120 (basically like 240 8th notes in a minute and the accent will happen on every 6 beats). You can turn the accent (click on 1) off by pressing “c” on your keyboard. Space will stop and start the metronome and comma and full stop will change the tempo by 10s and the up and down arrows will change the tempo by ones. The transparency control will make the metronome, well, transparent. That’s so that you can see through it if you have something in the window below the metronome you need to see. Click on 2 and 4… This is useful for 4/4 beats. In jazz school, this was a big deal. It’ll make the only beats you hear
the 2 and the 4 (or in a pop song the snare drum). It helps to improve your sense of time as you have to locate the 1 beat. Tip: count like
2…..
4…… 2…… 4….1…..2….3….4…..
Lots of jazz musicians play like this and so I decided to include this feature! Let’s look at the other tools:
The Splitter
This will split the beat into clicks. Here, for every beat it will click three times – triplets. You can change volume of the clicks and also see how many notes a second it is (for you speed freaks). The speed will adjust when you change the tempo. If you hover over the 3 here it will change colour and you can use the up and down arrows to change it. When you hover over click, you can change it to bar so you can hear the click split over the whole bar.
The Bass Movement Tool This is a great tool with lots of uses. Say you learnt a new lick and want to play it through all 12 keys. Bass Movement will play all those 12 notes in 12 different ways. The most common in jazz school was the circle of 4ths. You can also get the bass note to change every bar or hold over 2, 4 and 8 bars. The next bass note coming appears on the right while the last bass note been is on the left. Obviously, the big one in the middle is note playing.
You can use this for licks, new chords, ear training and any number of things!
The Chord Player
I’ll tell you what I use this for… I make chord specific licks over it. Basically it’ll play any chord types you have (or have added to GSRT), in any key and in a variety of inversions (drop 3, drop 2 voicings (see Quick Chords of those)). It will play our chosen chord on the 1 beat of every bar.
Random tempo Playing licks solidly means that you can play them at a variety of tempos. Set the lowest tempo and highest tempo here and whenever you press “R”, your tempo will change to a random number between these two values!
Record Control Recording yourself playing with the tempo can also be great for personal feedback. If you change this control to “on”, every time you start the metronome, your computer will use your microphone to record you as you play along. Use “h” to hear the result. You can also speed it up if you like and save it to disk.
Tempo advice Timing is one of the hardest skills for guitar players to pick up. The metronome is a crucial device to have in your toolkit. It can teach you to play in time and lock in. However, to develop great feel, you need to be able to practice without a metronome and play in time so that it feels good – that means everything you play must be in-time with itself. Make use of the recorder tool for instant feedback. Timing is more important than the notes (though notes are important).
The Invertor With this tool, a whole world of opportunities opens up. You can take a scale or chord, make a shape and move it up, down and sideways across the neck, conforming to the notes in the scale/chord.
We have our neck (all tools are also for 4, 5 and 6 string bass) with the selected scale (C major). We have our “mouse” with the Hot Keys seen, a list of sequences, a loop control, a metronome, visual display controls and at the top we see a curious block where we can store our neck shapes a button files. Let’s see how it works: I’ve chosen a shape in C major
“W” takes it down
“S” up
You’ll notice that the shape morphs to fit the chosen scale – loads of possibilities!
“A” sideways
The sequences: There is a list of 40 sequences to play your selection. You just click on a sequence and click your space bar! Sequences are a great way to spice up your soloing and these could be a launch pad for some brave new ideas.
For the speed of playback you have a metronome (comma and full stop key go up or down in increments of 10). If you hover over the 8 in “8 notes a click”, the 8 will turn orange and we can change its value with the comma and full stop key) We can choose between scales or chords, see the notes, see the spelling, hide the text and choose enharmonics (example – FX (F double sharp) becomes G). I think the looping thing is obvious.
Selecting notes To make things easier to see, I’ve made it possible to change the colours of the notes. If you click on notes it’ll turn blue, if you right click (Ctrl+click on Mac), it will appear yellow. Here’s a sweep arpeggio I’ve made in A harmonic minor: I chose the spelling view in the controls.
I chose to hide the text and I’ve pressed “W”
again
And again.
So now we have 4 really cool sweeps that will fit to harmonic minor. We could have done this all on paper (I spent hours doing this in my early years as a player). But with a simple hot key, I eliminated any need to waste trees!
I can play these back in any of the sequences and by pressing Ctrl+C (Mac -apple+C), I can send this image to the computer clipboard, or use Ctrl+F (apple+F) to save it on the hard drive as a jpeg. Depending on your view controls, that’s how the image will look. Unless specified the menu option (under export graphic), the image will be cropped to show only the frets with notes on them and a fretnumber like below: And this image was made exactly this way!
Button Files
Sometimes, you’ll come across some shape ideas you really want to hold onto. You can store it as a button. With your shape selected, press one of the little yellow buttons. That button will now be loaded with that shape, complete with its scale/chord. To recall it, just press the big button with the notes on it. You may have a couple of cool shapes. If you press the blue “i” button, you’ll open a blue window where you can add some information about this collection on shapes. This “button file” will now be available for saving. When you press Ctrl+O (Apple+O), the button file manager will open and you can recall any button files you saved.
Free form
Say you don’t know what scale a cool shape you found is in. You just think it sounds cool and you want to take it through its inversions. Choose Free form on. Now whenever you click on a note, that note will be added to the neck as a possible inversion note. This feature was added after spending a couple of hours via skype through guitar master Derryl Gable. He was working on some chord inversions using very specific shapes without root notes. This tool was for that very thing.
Here are some inversions for the Gmaj7 chord. This isn’t just for shredders!
This last example is the same as the third example. I pressed “D” to take the same notes and play them on a different set of strings.
Export to Neck Builder The Export graphic menu, we have a lot of options. As of writing this manual, the newest tool is Neck Builder. We can export our graphic straight from the Invertor to Neck Builder and work on it further there.
Here are some examples!
QuickChords A long time ago, before jazz school, I wrote a book called “Learn to burn: The Guitar Speed Manual”. I had discovered a book several years before that covered chords in drop 3 voicings and drop 2 voicings. I didn’t really understand what drop 3 or drop 2 were, but as I worked through the exercises I suddenly realized that my fingers had memorized how to play a variety of chords in any place on the neck without having to think much about it! I had actually come across these chords before with PG music’s jazz guitar software. This company makes one of the best accompaniment software of all time (band-in-a-box) as well as one of the worst DAWs (Powertracks). QuickChords is the answer to these chord solutions. On guitar and 6 string bass, it’ll give you 25 ways to play any chord! Not only that, but it’ll give you a list of scales that fit this chord that you can click on and see around each voicing, the option to see each chord as chords and scales, just scales or arpeggio. You can also see pluralities (this means other chords that share all or some the same notes – great for substitutions).
•
The neck. Whenever you click on one of the chord voicings, you’ll see and hear it on the neck.
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This will also be displayed on the zoom window on the top right. By clicking the options to the right of that, you can see also the notes or spelling in that view.
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See the list of scales in the little notepad? Click on any of those and you’ll see each voicing with those scale notes around it.
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You can store up to 4 different chords in the button tool (see the Invertor about how to use it).
You select chords by clicking on “choose a chord” up the top. A drop down menu will appear where you can select your chord.
Chords with Scales Let’s choose Ami7.
We get a list of scales that fit Ami7. As you can see, there are all sorts of scales! Let’s choose Dorian. Dorian is one of the basic modes. It has a minor bluesy sound to it. Below, you can see the chords plus the scale of A dorian as it fits over each of them. The grey notes in the scale lets you know that these notes are also notes from Ami7. I clicked on the 2nd down on the left. This put it onto the neck and into the big view as well as playing it!
Application: Using this, you can come up with cool lines that fit this chord. Start on a chord tone or a grey note and finish on a grey note. To get extra chord colour in these, alternate between chord tone, white tone, chord tone, white tone, etc.… and finish on a chord tone. For cooler, fresher lines go for wider jumps!
For a more in depth look at A dorian, click on the scale info button.
You’ll get a break down of the notes in A dorian and all the chords that fit in it. If you click on the chords they will play. You also get a list of scales that share the same notes (these happen to be all the major based modes) and scales that don’t have the same amount of notes, but what notes they do have also fit A Dorian (and you also play ad see information about them
Views
You have four views to choose from. Arpeggios is a great choice of you wanted to see all the chord tones in these voicings. Now, you see that some of the notes have numbers i.e 1, b3, b7. These can be turned off in the menu bar under “Chord Notes”.
The 3 and 7 notes (in this case, b3, b7) are called guide tones. You can actually get away with just playing these two to play a really low impact version of this chord. This works really well if you’re playing guitar in the same band as a busy piano player who’s playing every chord note they can get their hands on. They are also great notes to launch solo lines from. The 1 is the root note of the chord – i.e. A Arpeggios can definitely be used to make chord licks as all the notes fit the chord in question. As when making lines, wide intervals will make them more interesting. If you’ve been playing for a while, you may agree with me when I say that the harder to play licks sound the most interesting!
Pluralities Pluralities are accessed from the little note book. They are essentially chords that have similarities with this Ami7 chord. C6 has the same notes, A, C, E and G. B#6 is the same as C6 (C=B#) If you got rid of the F out of Fmaj9, you would have notes that fit Ami7 You could also play a C chord and have the lowest note play a A note. These can be used for substitutions. You could spice up “Knocking on Heavens Door” for like this: [G with [G
|Am
|C
|C
]
|Fmaj9
|C
|C/A
]
Just remember to tell your band mates.
Output Each voicing can be right-clicked on, then via the menu that appears, be sent to the computer clipboard, to file, to the GST Clipboard (for use in Chord Libraries or the worksheet) or opened in Neck Builder. You can print your chords and depending on the view you’ve chosen, it’ll will determine the printout. Chords:
This will give you the 25 chord shapes as well as all the scales that fit and their notes. You also get a list of pluralities. This is similar to the printout of chords and scales and arpeggios, with the 25 voicing being replaced by how the view was. On the next page we’ll see what happens when you have chosen “Just Scales” in the view…
Just Scales So, we have the scales in 25 shapes, the black note being the root. Scales that share the same notes Information about the scale All the chords that fit this scale. Pretty awesome right?
Why so many chords? Well, changing chords smoothly by moving each note in the chord (or voice) as little as possibly is called good voice leading. If you only know your E-shape Chords and you’re A shape Chords, then it’s not going to be good voice leading. Check out this example for good voice leading…. The chord progression is Dmi7, G7b9, Cmaj7. As you can see, only 2 notes are changing at a time. Dmi7
G7b9
Cmaj7
I’ll think that you’ll agree that QuickChords is an incredibly useful tool. •
In guitar or 6 string bass there are 25 voicing shown
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In 5 string bass, there are 15 voicings shown
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In 4 string bass, there are 4 voicings shown
Right-click on any chord shape and you can send it to Neck Builder. This will be a different output depending on the view, i.e. Chords, Chords and Scales, Just Scale and Arpeggios. It’s a great way to save for further study!
Voicing simply means a way of playing a chord with the chord notes played in a different order. On guitar you have
6 different voices. Drop 2 voicings are formed by taking a chord and then dropping the next to the highest note, or voice, to the lowest
note of the chord. Drop 3 - this voicing are made dropping or moving the 3rd voice from top at the octave below.
Chord Library Although QuickChords will provide many more chords than any player might use, there are without question all sorts of chord shapes it doesn’t cover. The Chord Library tool is for exactly that. Not only can you compile a list of great chord voicings, but you can build libraries that you could use for SightReader or Sight-reading Primer to use as source chords for musical notation.
I have a chord library titled “ii-V-I-VI”. You can see that up the top of the window. If you make any alterations, an asterisk will appear beside it. I have clicked on the top chord and it has appeared on the fretboard (also it played through my speakers). Then I right-clicked on it (Crtl+Click on Mac) and a little menu appeared allowing me to send it to the edit box on the top right. You can also see that it’s laid out nicely. I wanted a chord library to have the function to be readable.
Let’s see how you add chords to it…
The edit window We have our fretboard here (strings going down, frets across). First we may want to set the Root note of the chord. This does means that will probably mean that you will need to know your fretboard (I will list a sure-fire method for this at the end of this manual). Press the key change button. Click on the note in question. Then we can start adding the other notes. If you don’t want a string playing (even the one with root note on it, you can turn it off by changing the fingering). To change the fingering, just click on the fingerings above the string and clicking on them will cycle through all the possibilities. We can also click on then and type on our keyboard for the symbol). The arrow buttons to the left give us the ability to move our shape up and down the fretboard. If you end up with a root note of C# and want the root note to be D b, click on the flip key to change from C # to Db. Sometimes we want the notes to be a certain spelling or note. We can use our right-click (Ctrl+click Mac) on the notes themselves to toggle them between different notes of the same pitch. If I right-clicked on this b3 here, it would change to #9. This may not be such a big deal – but if you’re using for SightReader Chords, it would make difference to the way it is displayed in notation! As shown, you can see the notes and the spelling aby using the control on the right side.
The final step is to give it a name. You can type directly in the text box on the top. If you click on a place on the big page, you will see a blue square appear. When you press the put/update key, the chord will get put there. If you click on a chord and the blue square box appears around it, pressing ‘get’ will bring it into the edit box.
Layout Put the chords where you want. You can press the ‘blank selected’ to remove and put white space. Pressing ‘add right separator’ and adding anything to a blue square box will add a vertical line to whatever you add or blank.
Text Change tabs in you little notebook at the bottom to this: You can type into this box. You can set the font size. As you can see, it’s 15 right now. This font also has some other cool tricks. Typing % will give you a flat (b) and typing at # will give you a sharp (#). Then press submit and then put/update to add it to your blue box. This thing about the sharps and flats is universal inside GSRT. That works anywhere where you want to add a description or information about anything.
The Menu
File contains your usual suspects… New Library, Open, Save, Save as, Print and exit. Import /Export has four options … Import from file and Export to file has to do with the Guitar SightReader Toolbox
Exports folder on your desktop. Import from the web will open up the community content, and export will open up a web browser where you can post it to me to add to community sharing. Pages – Add new page (the maximum is 5 pages), clear page and delete page. Notes – toggle on root notes and guide tones Open up – here you can open up the metronome or quick chords Help – the help video for this tool GST Clipboard – clear the Guitar SightReader Clipboard
Guitar SightReader Clipboard Look over at the neck… there is a tap control at the top You can add your chords to the Guitar SightReader Clipboard by right clicking on them and choosing this option. You can also do this in QuickChords. The benefit is that you can now drag any of the chords in the list box into any place in Chord Libraries. This is cool if you have some chord from an opened library that you want to add to a new library, or you want make use of some chords you got out of QuickChords to use in a library. Other applications you can use them in are Worksheet and Neck Builder.
You can also add some information about your chord library via this icon on the top right.
By right-clicking on any chord diagram in in your library, you can export it to Neck Builder…
Will become
Then you can use Neck Builder to stylize as much as you want (change colours, note shapes, etc.…).
The Recorder
This is a cool little tool to record you playing through your computer microphone. This is great if you want to hear how you sound like. You can also change the speed of your recorded track. “R” to record “H” to hear it “S” to stop (recording or playback). Speeding it up will help you create new technique goals for yourself. It you have a clear example of how something should sound, it’s easier to nail. In an interview with Yngwie Malmsteen, he said that he used to go to the studio to record and when he played it back at home, the tape player where he lived played back faster than usual. This tool is found in various tools in Guitar SightReader Toolbox… •
Transcriber
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Lick Library
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Progression Player
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Metronome.
Audio As of the manual, there are two ways to record. QuickTime and OpenAL. This can also be set to off if you get crashes. GSRT may crash if you use QuickTime when you run an of the Audio tools. Be calm and change it OpenAL. If that crashes then set it to none. All of this can be accesses via the main page menu.
Lick Library I wrote a book 7-8 years ago called “Guitar Virtuosity of the Everyday Man”. Back then I used diagrams of my old software “Guitar Freak Workstation”. One of the sections was on creating a lick library exercise book. Here how I set out my way of storing licks.
Well, when I started this software, I thought this: What about a tool that I can store my licks from my music collection as sound files, able to speed them up and slow them down and able to import a graphic from Guitar Pro or other software. Could I get it to automatically store the song and the time position? Could I store it in easy retrievable libraries? Well, I present to you a tool that can do all that!
This window is quite self-explanatory. Our list of saved lick is here in the middle. If we click on a lick and press the play button, we can hear it. We also have a scroll bar on the right so we can scroll the page if it larger than our screen size (my laptop is 1366 x768) On the next page, we can go through the process of storing a lick.
When we open the Lick Library, we get this window:
As you can see, I have more than a few lick libraries. I’ve used the transcriber to go through all my albums of these players and compile libraries of all my favourite licks. Note: I cannot share these libraries with you as you must make your own out of your own record collection. Don’t muck around with copyright laws. It’s just not worth the world of pain you may reap. I’ve already clicked here on add. I’m going to add a library called sample.
The main Lick Library window will be opened and this will have created the sample library. It’s empty:
So it’s time to add a lick!
Click here
And you’ll get this window:
You will want to get your sound file. On the menu do this: Tools > Launch Audio Snipper The Audio Snipper will open:
Load a song. I’m going to add a lick from Alcatraz (featuring Yngwie Malmsteen) called “Hiroshima mon amour”.
Now, I’m going to find my lick I want to get…
I’ve found a lick. Do this, set a start point (left click on the wave) and set an end point by right clicking on the wave (Mac = Ctrl+click). Then we can check it by pressing Audition. If you don’t like it, refine it until you get the snippet how you like it. I like to have a little time before the lick so that I can determine in the bar where it starts. Be sure to set the end point as that will make the start point work. You can see in the above example that the start marker and end marker both have time values. I’ll Trim and copy to the clipboard.
That’s our lick. I can audition it to check how it sound and then press Close.
Now to add the lick: Go to the menu bar and go Insert > Sound > Load from Audio Clipper Now you have your lick:
You’ll also notice that there’s new info in the section on the left. There is the track name, and the start marker. Let add the rest of the information by clicking on that area. This will open and we can fill out any other information about the song. Then press X.
Now, I tab it out. I used Guitar Pro 6 for this. It’s a great tool and works really well for tab. You can get a copy here. Windows: Use “snip” which is a windows screen capture tool. Then edit>copy from the snip menu bar. It’s now on the clipboard Mac: Use Command-Control-Shift-4, then select an area: It will take a screenshot of an area and save it to the clipboard
Go to your menu and it’s : Insert > Image > Take from Clipboard.
Viola!
While I was in Guitar Pro, I noted that the song was in B minor, also at 110 Bpm, so I added this additional information. Yngwie records in Eb tuning (all string tuned down ½ a step). This tab i written as if he was in standard tuning. What if I want to practice this? Press “M” to start the metronome. When you slow down the lick the metronome will follow. If you want to record yourself playing this lick, via your computer’s microphone, to see if you can nail it, press the red circle at the top
If you read up the recorder, you’ll know how this bottom panel works! When you’re ready, press Save This Lick and close:
Congratulations! You’ve just added your first lick. If, in the Lick Library your lick doesn’t appear, if your screen is big enough, it should show a refresh button at the bottom… Scroll down using the scroll bar on the right and press it. Here’s what it now looks like!
Click on it and press Work on Ticked Licks You’ll open up a similar window – but it’s not editable. There is the option to edit it from the above window.
I want to show you something else. Go tools>Add lick to the familiarizer. Now close this window and in the main panel go Launch Tools > Launch familiarizer Tool
You’ll get this window
This is the familiarizer Tool. Here, you can select any of the licks in our libraries that you added to the familiarizer and play them over and over. Why? Well, I believe, that in order to nail a lick, you really need to know what it sounds like. The clearer the picture the more likely you are to play it well. Press this arrow button on the bottom right.
You can see a whole bunch of lick I’ve sent to the familiarizer. Our Yngwie Lick is the 4th from the top. Tick the licks you want to get familiar with and then press the arrow button again.
Check out the tools in the menu and then you can play these straight or shuffled. Also, if you have a huge list of licks, you can create a preset so you don’t have to go through and click all the licks you want again.
These tools are exclusive to Guitar SightReader Toolbox and I think you’ll find them really, really useful!
Eartraining When it comes to ear-training, Guitar SightReader Toolbox has got you covered. There are 10 tools.
Let’ go through each one of them:
Interval Testing The most basic of all ear-training is the ability name intervals. Chords and melodies are built of intervals. This tool will train your ear to do this.
You simply tick the boxes of the intervals you want to be tested on and press test. When you hear the interval, you click on the name you think it is. The box under Success rate box will show you the first note, so you can also use the keyboard to name the note if you know it. The first list is intervals with the 2nd note higher than the first note and the 2nd is for when the 2nd note is lower. I would recommend that, for beginners, they get familiar with the melodies provided in the “Melodies for Intervals” tool.
Chord and Scales Test This should have been called “Chords and Scales Test”, but in my defence, I was living in Poland at the time and English wasn’t a priority! However, if you go to a jazz school or get any kind of tuition where you’ll have to identify chords and scales by ear, this is a great tool! You simply drag chords (right now it’s set to scales) from the right box into the middle box. You can save them as presets and recall them by selecting them in the boot left box and clicking on the load triangle.
The scales here are shuffled and after hearing them, you click on the one (this middle box) that you think it is! Your success rate is able to be reset by clicking on the box that it is in. In the Menu option, you can also turn on of off the computer voice. You also have the option of having the root-note of the chord or scale change, with a variety of options
Melodies for Intervals When you first start interval training, it’s helpful to learn melodies that start with intervals.
For example, a classic Perfect 5th is the first 2 notes of StarWars. When you click on any of the text on the left, you hear me play the interval, then the melody. I always start with a C notes (If you can recall a “C” back just by playing it back in your mind, have really good relative pitch and then transfer that to either your voice or your instrument, you will have rudimentary absolute pitch). I have included YouTube clips when possible. Due to YouTube, sometimes you’ll get unplayable video. You may get prompted to watch in YouTube (that will run in the same window) or you may have to hit the reload control on the bottom of the video.
Interval over Bass All credit for this idea comes from the mighty Brett Garsed (Australian Guitarist). To improvise well, you need to be hearing the note you’re playing over the bass (or chord). Then you can plan where to go. This tool will save the interval selections you make for when you open it next. Click test and then the interval over the bass you think it is. You can even use a piano keyboard if you’re not a guitarist.
Melody Movement 1. Press start. The first note will play. 2. Press space and the neck note will play 3. Click on the interval you think the 2nd note moved away from the first note. 4. Repeat from step 2 You can also use the time based option, but you either need to pretty quick with your mouse or use hot keys for the piano. Develop your ear and your transcribing skills by using this tool. Imagine being able to transcribe music away from your guitar or bass? Using single notes and after using this over short consistent time a day will give you an incredible new skill.
Perfect pitch tools Note match I based this on an article I read where a husband and wife conducted an experiment. One would play a note on 1 keyboard and the other one would try and play it back on the other keyboard. After a while they become completely accurate – even if it was the first note of the day. I’ve created a tool for this. Use the note match filters and the fret controls to limit the test area and click Use Filter You can also turn off and notes by clicking on the fretboard. Press test. It will play a note. Use either the keyboard or your own guitar to locate that note. Press space to reveal it. Press space to go to the next note
Random Note This is one of the most effective Perfect pitch tools. You choose your note in the location note. Play it on the keyboard (the far right note is C). Get used to it. Press S and random notes will begin generating. Whenever you hear the C, hit the space bar. To get harder, make available more notes from the tick boxes below or increase the speed or increase the octave choice. I’ll think you’ll find that C will stick in your head for hours after 5 minutes on this tool!
Library Perfect Pitch
Audiation is where you play songs back in your mind. This happens in the same key you often hear it in. The more things you can associate with the song (i.e moving our hands to the chords) the clearer and more precise you will play it back. Get songs that you know well in your music collection and use this tool to get familiar with them. You can make notes in Pitch information about what pitches the song starts with. Having the keyboard handy means that you don’t need to go and get our guitar in order to find the first pitch notes that you’ll be remembering. 1. Clicking on the track name loads it into the media 2. Mentally recall it… sing the first series of notes 3. Play it back on the media player – did you get close to it?
Perfect pitch method For those of you who bought David L. Burges Perfect Pitch course, I pity you for having to sit through 5 hours of this guy raving on and on about how nice it is to have perfect pitch. On the last CD he says: You recognize the colours of the notes by Eb will sound mellower than an F# which sounds twangy in comparison. Also, you may not have a partner to practice the exercises. So I made a partner for you!
Progression Recognition
This tool looks truly daunting I know. It’s a way to recognize progressions. In the top right box, you can make progressions. You can info on them, play them back. When you’re ready to save it, choose a progression group and click save. This will then save it into that progression group.
When you are ready for testing, choose a progression group and click on the load arrow. There is a list of the progressions in that group. You can turn progressions to be tested on with the tick boxes.
off the Click Test and choose the progression you think it is. If you’re making a progression and you want a chord type that isn’t in the box (I mean the one that has Major at the top here). Just right click on it and it will show you a menu of every chord type in GSRT and you can add your preferred chord type to the box. You can export and import your progressions like in the other tools. There is lots of scope here for making recognition tricky. Recognising progressions will do wonders for your ear, musicianship, learning of songs and transcribing! If you’re just starting off, make some progression groups with really easy chords.
Tempo Recognition Have you ever been in the position of starting the band and completely forgetting the tempo? I have! With this tool you’ll be able to recall tempos by simply playing back songs you know well. 1. Click on the songs to load them into the medium player. 2. Listen to them in your mind and imagine the tempo and start counting it. Make a mental note of the tempo number. 3. Play the song in the media player and see how close you got. When you add a song, the tunes with the highest tempo will go automatically to the top of the list. Hint: In a song (pop song), the snare drum will be on the 2 and the 4.
Music is a hearing art, so developing your ear is the most crucial aspect of becoming a musician. Things to work on… 1. Practice playing a note in your mind and then bringing it out into the open world by singing it. You don’t have to be Pavarotti… If you have a song playing in your head, so if you can hum it in the same key. 2. Practice singing the major scale. Sing the numbers i.e. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7. Practice singing sequences. 3. Learn to sing in semitones (i.e. jaws r fur Elise). Then you can alter the major scale degrees to make other scales (i.e. Jazz Minor is 1, 2, b3, 4, 5, 6, 7). Sing the 3 down 1 semitone (of 1 fret lower) to get b3.
Progression Center For the improvising player, learning to play over chord progressions is essential. This is one of the key skills you can develop with the progressions center. The progression center is comprised of 2 parts - the progression creator and the progression player. There is a 4/4 version and a 3/4 version. When we click on the progression center, we are greeted by this window… Here we can choose the time signature. We can go to the player or we can go to the creator. In the creator, we can create progression sets. We have 3 here. We can add or delete these sets as seen. We’re going to choose jazz progressions and press the choose button.
The Progression Creator
These tools rely on the concept that you understand music spelling. At the end of the book, you can read up on this topic in order to get a handle on it. For the purpose of learning about this tool, we’ll assume that you already understand it. We can choose up to 4 bars for a progression. The red hand is the beat where the chord we will choose will be inserted. The red hand can by moved to any of the 16 beats just by clicking on them. Right now the key signature is C, and the I of C is C. Whenever you choose any of the roman numerals, they set the chord with a default chord type. That can be changed by clicking on the Choose Another Chord Type button. We see a list of the progressions listed in this Jazz Progressions set. Also, we can see, in Roman numerals (the spelling), the progression for each. All the chords are shown using nomenclature, which is a type of musical chord shorthand. This can also be checked out at the end of this book. A great benefit of this tool is that it can be played.
Here I have selected Major II-V-I in the progressions and pressed the Edit button. It’s now loaded. I can now press the Loop off button to make it loop, which will play the progression over and over. Then I can jam over it. The comma and the full stop keys decrease the tempo by 10 respectively and the up and down arrows alter it by 1 for fine tuning. Like the progression player, the chords are chosen from 4 drop 3 chord voicings and will randomly choose from these 4 voicings for more colours during playback. I think the save buttons and import/export features are pretty self-explanatory.
The Progression Player
The progression player lists all progressions from all sets available. To select the progressions to play, simply click and drag them from the left box into the right box. You can see I’ve dragged and dropped 2 progressions here. I love using band-in-a-box. Nowhere is this tools as sophisticated (and expensive) as band-in-a-box, but it serves a different purpose. First of all, these progressions can play back in a variety of key centers. You can either select them individually or use the presets on the left. I clicked on vanilla for this example. We see 2 staves of chords here. The top stave is what is playing now and the lower stave will move up and become the top stave after the top stave has finished playing. I see on the top stave two 2 bar minor I-V progressions. The first is in the key of F and the second is in the key of D. The key center is dictated from the key selected when the progression was created and these progressions play relative to that. Essentially, it gives you a fantastic vehicle for practising your improvising over changes, chord comping and eartraining (trying to guess which progression is playing). The menu gives you several options including: •
Click features: Every beat, only 2 and 4, no click
•
Chord Display (Use long chord names or musical shorthand)
•
Instruments. Turn off the bass or keys and set whether the bass only plays the root note of the chord
•
Control list
•
Print up to 5 pages of progressions based on the selected keys and progressions.
Also available is the option to record yourself playing along via your computers microphone and listen back to see how well you did.
Add/Edit Chords
There is a whole bunch of chords that come with Guitar SightReader Toolbox. However, you can also add Chords here is you don’t already have it. You will need to know musical spelling if you want to use this or for adding or editing scales. You can also reorder the list of chords by dragging them around in the list. When you save a chord, it will save under the chord selected in the list. You can give it a description, hear it and see it on the neck of your instrument. If you add more chords, I would suggest you do a Mass backup (see the main page menu on how to do that) when reformatting your hard drive or reinstalling Guitar SightReader Toolbox, so you can reimport them along with your other presets.
Add/Edit Scales
Adding scales is pretty much the same as how you add chords. There are some extra features however. You can add a special passing note. I’ve loaded in the Bebop scale and in this scale the passing note is a B note. If we play this scale without the passing note, it’s a mixolydian scale…. But you can read about that in the description! You can learn a lot about these by clicking on a scale and reading the description. Once again, there is a huge list of scales to choose from but feel free to add any that you cannot find here.
Practice Scheduler Practicing is a big part of being a good player, unfortunately, as creative individuals, we can get distracted easily. The practice scheduler is a tool directly suited to make your practice time more productive. It also can be exported, saved to a USB and given to your students so they can use it with their copy of Guitar SightReader Toolbox (see what I did there). This will make sure they get down exactly what they should before the next lesson. Let’s have a look at it.
I’ve loaded up a saved schedule called “The Jazz Guitarist”. The time for each subject will change depending on how long you have to practice. Simply enter in the free time you have, or choose a preset time, look at your first topic (Warm up) and press Start! Your clipboard on the main window will look like this
If you forget what you’re practicing, just hover over the top of the clipboard and you’ll get a little tooltext telling you what topic you’re on.
When it’s time to start the next section a timer window will open and let you know what you’re about to practice.
The key to getting good at something is just a matter of clocking the hours. Some people believe that it take 10,000 hours to get good at something. Well, if practice is well scheduled, you’ll get there a lot quicker that 10,000 hours!
Creating a practice schedule In your clipboard menu, choose File > New Practice Schedule. Click on the Design tab on our window.
The design section is based on 1 hour. Simple enter in your practice Title, choose the amount of minutes for that section and click Add. The 60 minutes will now reduce to however long the section you added was. Don’t worry so much about the order. You can drag the sections in the list to whatever order you like! Notes: This is where you may enter whatever you like – more detailed descriptions of practice sections, things that you discover that brought you to the next level.
More Tools Due to the amount of real estate of the main window and the ever increasing tools that I keep adding to Guitar SightReader Toolbox, I’ve created a way to open additional tools by clicking on this here toolbox image.
We’ll look at these tools in depth.
Exam Creator and Tester Exam Creator allows you to make any number of tests, on any number of topics. It actually came out of a software program called “Pinglish”. I was living in Poland at the time and I wanted to make an app that would help both English speakers learning Polish (like me) and Polish people learning English. I was just a matter of time before I realized that this would be incredibly useful for Guitar SightReader Toolbox.
To Create an Exam First, create a new exam by going File>New Exam Enter your headings
The heading box has two fields. The first will replace Key Signature and the 2nd will replace scale. I’ve just made one….
Now, to add an entry I press Control + R (Apple + R for mac).
I’ve added two questions for my exam I’ve also selected them so I can be tested on them. For testing I have two choices… •
Ask Questions - I will have to type the chords to the songs
•
Mark Questions to Answers. I will be given the chords and I have to name the song.
After your test, you will get a score and how much time it took you to finish the test. When answering, spaces are not important; neither is Upper case or Lower case. This can be great for testing yourself or students. You can also produce great printouts (if you want to give a written exam to your students for example).
Community Content
Here you can download presets for your tools. In any of these tools, when you export a preset or file to the web, it opens a webpage where you can email the file to me. I’ll have a look at it and then add it to our community content. I also plan to create some more content here! Oh – you have to be on the internet to access these presets.
Setlist Manager Here’s a great tool for working musicians. I actually developed when I decided I need an app for a covers band I was playing in. It was a trio and we were using playback for keys, other backing vocals and the occasional extra guitar part. The drummer would have a list of tunes and when he would hit the space bar it would move to the next tune. I also thought it might be good to have some kind of area to include extra information like song form and chords. It would be extra helpful if I could print that out also!
To add a song, click the Add New Song button. You can either type in the name, or leave it blank and attach an mp3 or another music file format by using the Load a Music File (Playback) button and it will also load the song name into the new title. You can reorder the song list by dragging the space for the earphones around (the earphones are shown when there’s an attached music file. Other Controls: •
M – stop song
•
Spacebar – next song
•
S - Restart song
•
R – Start from beginning of list.
There are also some other goodies when you right click on the song title. You can send the attached song to the transcriber for closer study or to slow down to nail the more difficult parts. You could use this for guitar show backing tracks, your band’s set-list, a list of songs you want to learn to play and whatever way you might find this tool a use for!
Neck Builder This tool was introduced in Guitar SightReader 4.1.0. It’s a graphical way of designing anything to do with the neck when it comes to chords or scales.
It can be designed, saved, gotten or edited on a local database. You have an array of symbols you can use, as well as a variety of colours. When we open this tool, it looks like this:
We can click on the fretboard. This creates a square. A 2nd click will place a note shape set to the current colour. At that point we can also place some text as well. On the above picture on the right-hand side, there are numbers and note letters. Clicking on these will add the text to the fret place. It doesn’t need to be on a note shape either. You can choose individual colours for every note and text. The text controls also can have flats, double flats, sharps and double sharps by clicking on the circle buttons. Returning them to normal is with the Natural circle button. You can add your own text by typing in the Alt. text box and pressing enter. Typing nothing in that box and pressing enter clears any text.
You can add fret numbers in the same way you add text to fret placings. Just click to the left of the fretboard and then press on the numbers or note, or use the alt. text box. Sometimes, if you use double digits (like 10) the text might get covered up by a note. In the tab control, choose lines, fret no.
Moving the slider to the left increases the distance of the fret numbers to the left of the fretboard. As above, you can see there’s a line in this shape. You can right click on any fret place and then right click on another and that will create a line between them. Use Ctrl+click on the Mac.
This is a bit of an extreme example. You can turn this line off by unclicking the second line box. You can also delete it by rightclicking it and choose delete from the menu. Saving involves pressing the save button. It will take about 3 seconds to save as it is writing quite bit to disk. Getting an image, editing an image and deleting an image are done by right
clicking on the images on the left. When you edit an image, the save button disappears and you get an update button. The only way to get out of the edit mode is to choose File > New Shape.
When you are in edit mode, changing the number of Strings or frets will wipe your fretboard. Try not to do it! Searching for your chord is done on the tool at the far left. Enter a name for a chord in the Name Box and press enter. You may have made chords and scales for a particular tune. If you saved those shapes with the group name being the song title, leave the name box empty and enter the name in the group name box and press enter. You could look for a specific chord by filling out both boxes.
Changing the finger number at the top is quite easy. Just click on the number (It will receive a blue box around it and enter any one of the list on the right with the keyboard.
You can import fretboards from QuickChords, Chord Libraries and the Invertor Tool. Go check those out for more information. Exporting your graphic is where the power is. You can save it as a graphic or copy it to the computer clipboard. Also, you can export it in a variety of sizes, 100%, 75%, 50% and 25%. I highly recommend this tool for instructional video, handouts, publications and your own study. I know that’s why I’ll be using it!
Guitar Change Runner This tool I added for mostly selfish reasons. I wanted to pinpoint the actual notes that change and the notes that stay the same when moving from chord to chord or scale to scale. This is also the tool that will show you a chord or scale as it is all over the neck.
Opening this tool will present you with 3 fretboards (it can be guitar or bass). On the left hand side panel we have: •
New – wipes everything, ready for new inputs
•
Opens the chord and scale chooser
•
Display – you can see the note alterations (which are in red) or without.
•
Views – you can see either note names, scale degrees or no text.
•
The lowest and highest fret filter. This just fills in selected areas of the neck. You can also left click on the first fretboard to set the lowest fret and right click (Ctrl+click on Mac) to select the highest fret
•
Load a preset – select from the list below
•
Save Preset – create a name in the text box and press the button to add a preset to the box
•
Delete Preset – pretty self-explanatory
When you click the chord/scale chooser you get the window where you can edit the chords and scale
To edit each of the four necks, click on the bar in the staff to edit.
You can see that I am currently editing the 3rd guitar neck. For each, choose a root note. You can then choose any chord or scale in Guitar SightReader Toolboxes vast list of these things. If you choose a chord, the scale pull-down list will be limited to only the scales that fit that chord. You also have wonderful option of sending your selection of chords to the Progression creator! On the next page, there are our necks after press the close “X” on the top right…
I also limited the range to between the 5th and 9th frets. The yellow notes are the notes of the chord The blue notes are the notes of the scale that are not part of the chord The red notes are the notes that are different from the neck on the left of each neck. There are several applications for this tool, I have mine and I look forward to seeing how others use it.
Learning the Fretboard Learning all the notes on the fretboards may seem like a daunting task. In this following method, I want to give credit to Derryl Gabel, guitarist extraordinaire and an excellent on-line teacher from Florida. I learnt all the notes a long time ago, but I could have saved a lot of time with this.
The circle of 4ths Let’s learn these notes
C
F
B b Eb A b D b
Gb
B
G
E
A
D
Now, these are all 12 notes. Notice that it starts with C and F… Circle of Fourths. Next we have the word “BEAD” and then a G – the first time all flats, the second time without. 1. Do this on one string 2. Say the note name as you play it (very important) 3. Time yourself – how fast can you do it? You’ll learn all the notes in an astonishingly short amount of time! Learning the circle of 4 th is extremely important for people who are interested in Jazz as a lot of jazz tunes are comprised of chords that follow this cycle… Play the following example to hear that sound.
[Dm7
|G7
|Cmaj7
|Cmaj7
]
If you check out some jazz standards, you’ll be surprised how often you’ll see chords separated by intervals of 4ths.
Spelling Musical Spelling in maths – but cooler than calculus!
This is C major. The Major scale is the fundamental scale that we measure all other scales and chords against. The major scale gets then given numbers As you can see, there are no sharps or flats. The spelling for a major scale is: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7. It doesn’t just stop at one… we could think of a 1 as an 8 And continue 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 (2), 10 (3), 11 (4), 12 (5), 13 (6)
The spelling for a Natural minor scale (Aeolian) is 1, 2, b 3, 4, 5, b6, b 7, 1
Chords are generally made of odd numbers. Check out the table on the following page…
Chord Spellings Keep in mind… a 9 is the same notes as a 2, 11 as a 4 and 13 as a 6. Major Family
Minor Family
Dominant Family
3 and 7 C (1,3,5) Csus2 (1,2,5) Csus4 (1,4,5) C6 (1,3,5,6) C6/9 (1,3,5,6,9) Cadd9 (1,3,5,9)
b3 and b7 Cm (1,b3,5) Cmadd9 (1,b3,5,9) Cm6 (1,b3,5,6) Cm7 (1,b3,5,b7) Cm9 (1,b3,5,b7,9) Cm11 (1,b3,5,b7,9,11)
3 and b7 C7 (1,3,5,b7) C9 (1,3,5,b7,9) C11 (1,3,5,b7,9,11) C13 (1,3,5,b7,9,11,13) C7b5 (1,3,b5,b7) C7#5 (1,3,#5,b7)
Caug (C+)
Cm13 (1,b3,5,b7,9,11,13) Cmmaj7 (1,b3,5,7)
C7b9 C7#9 C9#11
Cmaj7 Cmaj9 Cmaj11 Cmaj13 Cma7#5
(1,3, #5) (1,3,5,7) (1,3,5,7,9) (1,3,5,7,9,11) (1,3,5,7,9,11,13) (1,3, #5,7)
(see this chord above – it was explicitly told to have a normal 7)
Cm7 b5 (1,b3,b5,b7) Cdim (1,b3,b5) Cdim7 (1,b3,b5,bb7)
(1,3,5,b7,b9) (1,3,5,b7,#9) (1,3,5,b7,9,#11)
(The following chords are called altered th chords as they have and alter 5 and an th altered 9 . Sometimes C7alt maybe written – in that situation you can choose any below))
C7b5b9 C7#5b9 C7b5#9 C7#5#9
(1, 3,b5,b7,b9) (1, 3,#5,b7,b9) (1, 3,b5,b7,#9) (1, 3,#5,b7,#9)
Chord Shorthand Often called “Nomenclature”, this style of shorthand is quick way of writing chords. The most commonly used symbols are:
Chord Symbols C, C∆, C∆7, CM, CM7, Cma(7) C6, CM6, Cma6 th C∆9, CM9, Cma9, C7+9
Explanations Major, Maj7 C6 chord – C E G A Cmaj9 (Note that the “∆”, “M” or “ma” needs to be present for
a major 9th chord. If you see “C9”, it means a dominant 7th chord with an added 9th.)
C11 C13
C9+11th but without a 3rd (same as Gm7/C) C9 with a 6th (do NOT play an 11th in this chord)
C+ C∆+5, C∆#5, CM+5, CM#5, Cma+5,
C with#5 a #5 (C, E, G#) Cmaj7
Cma#5, C+5 CCmi7, C-7 CØ7, CØ Co , Cdim
Co7, Cdim7
C minor Cm7 Cm7b5 C with a b3 and b5 (C, Eb, Gb) Cdim7 (Cb, Eb, Gb, Bbb)
Final tips Whenever you are entering text in descriptions, notes and general text, anytime you want to get an accidental in your text, use “%” for a flat ( %) and the hash key for a sharp (#). For tempos, we use the comma and full stop key for going up in intervals of 10. In the Transcriber it speeds and slows it down by 5%. Why do we use these keys?
Because they have the left and right arrows above them (greater and lesser signs to be exact)
In recording tools, we use: •
R to record
•
S to stop recording and playback
•
H to hear
