Hi folks. So when Justinâs lessons said I should make my own chord book, I wasnât really delighted with any of the existing chord diagram formats I was seeing online. So I went ahead and designed my own template, and wrote a software tool to generate chord diagrams using the template.
You may be thinking, âbut Brendan, that wasnât the assignmentâ, and, look ⊠you would not be totally wrong about that. But Iâm a software guy and sometimes I just canât help myself. I promise I eventually did use the tool to generate a bunch of chord diagrams and then assemble them into my own chord book.
Anyway, Iâve just finished building a web UI for the tool so anyone can use it. If you like the way this template looks, you are more than welcome to use it to generate your own diagrams. The source code is also released on Github if you want to download and run it on your own computer, or customise it for your own needs.
Iâm a huge fan of Python, use it all the time, and recommend it for a wide variety of situations â but I also completely understand the inertia against learning yet another language.
My language of choice on front end is javascript/react and backend is java, Iâve got decades of enterprise level experience with java so not keen to replace it at the backend. When wasm becomes mainstream, Iâm hoping to move to python on the front end as js is a huge ball of mud.
âhuge ball of mudâ is an unfairly positive description of JS. The only appropriate words we can use to describe it are against JG community guidelines.
@TheMadman_tobyjenner I do like the software Neck Diagrams too. As Justin says in grade 1 âdonât copy your boxes from a book or website. Create your ownâ so I use that software to create my own.
Well ⊠Iâve already done all the coding, and besides, the coding is my favourite part.
Justinâs chord library is a great resource for learning to play the chords, but like I said in the OP, I wasnât 100% happy with the way those diagrams look. Although to be fair, out of all the styles I found online, Justin got the closest to the kind of look I wanted.
That library also doesnât allow you to define your own custom chord fingering, which my app does.
@direvus nice. Iâm not a programmer but enjoy programming so I often take the âsledgehammer to a walnutâ approach myself .
Any chance you could modify this to allow for left-handed diagrams? Just needs to create a mirror image.
That sounds fairly possible, Iâll give it a try and see how I go. Would you want the order of the strings in the UI reversed as well? Or just the diag?
Also since last time I posted I have added a few other features to the web UI. The form now shows the note played on each string, and the scale degree of that note.
Thanks Mathieu, yes it is good fun. Never tried to manipulate an SVG in code before this project, but since SVG is just an XML document, I figured it would work out. And it totally did. In fact the coding part of it was really easy. I spent a lot more time on designing the diagram template than writing the code
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