NeckWise™

About

NeckWise™ is a guitar fretboard visualization tool, developed to work alongside online tuition videos. It was inspired by lessons that teach playing changes in one position, and encourage seeing chord tones in the context of scales.

NeckWise™ can display tonal objects and scales on the fretboard, one or the other, or both at the same time for context, such as chord tones as they relate to a pentatonic scale. Unlike other learning tools that require you to paint the fretboard or chord boxes with dots, NeckWise™ contains the music theory and guitar knowledge to make your study more productive.

The xWise Family of Learning Tools

NeckWise™ can only display one fretboard "state" at a time. After all, you can only play one thing at a time in one spot on the neck. Because there are many positions on the neck, many scale fingerings and chord voicings, multiple chords in a progression, and many backing tracks to choose from, NeckWise™ has spawned a number of utilities that specialize in ALL of one type of object:

• ScaleWise™ shows all fingerings for a given scale across the neck;
• ToneWise™ shows all of the voicings for a type of chord or tonal object;
• TrackWise™ manages your backing track library and has some useful playback features;
• ChangeWise™ is a unique tool that helps you learn changes in one position on the neck, by showing chords and scales from the same position on cards that can be stacked on top of each other or laid out vertically.

Credits

NeckWise™ is being developed in collaboration with leading guitar instructor Jeff McErlain. Together, we are shaping the tool to accompany his courses, starting with YouTube Freebies.

NeckWise™ is Free

The xWise tools are freeware. Contributions or "tips" are welcome if you find the tools useful and want to help defray our monthly hosting and development expenses. One email account works across all of them. Remember that content is not free, so ask your instructor about getting their course lessons and backing tracks to work safely with these tools. It's free to them and simple to do. We'll even send them half of your tip.

Beta Release Notes

NeckWise™ is pre-populated with Lessons (with links to YouTube videos) and System presets (no video link, but useful studies nonetheless). Users are encouraged to save their own presets, which requires sign-in. A Quick Start Guide and full User Guide are available through the HELP button, and a FEEDBACK button is provided as a way to report bugs or request features. The FEEDBACK mechanism takes a snapshot of the app state so we can reconstruct what you are seeing.