Fretboard
Chord Identifier & Player
How it works
Built out of years of writing songs and stumbling onto chord shapes I couldn't name. I wanted something I could pull up on the go to figure out what I was actually playing, hear it back, and run it through some pedals. So here it is.
- 1
Pick notes, get a chord
Tap any frets you want and the app reads the resulting pitch set, compares it against every chord shape it knows, and tells you the most likely name. Add a note, remove one, slide things around. The readout updates instantly.
- 2
It thinks the way a guitarist thinks
The same six notes can spell a dozen different chords depending on which one you call the root. The identifier weighs voicing, bass note, and the gaps between strings, then ranks the candidates so the obvious answer floats to the top and the weirder cousins sit underneath.
- 3
Every chord is also an instrument
Hit play and the built-in synth voices the shape, shaping oscillators through a stack of filters until they sound like a strummed or arpeggiated guitar. Tweak the arp pattern, change the strum direction, repeat the figure, and you have a tiny loop running off whatever shape your fingers landed on.
- 4
Run it through the pedalboard
The signal path is a real one: pickup, then whatever stomps you click on, then the amp. Reverb, drive, modulation, delay, all live, all reacting to your playing in real time. Stomp them on, dial them in, stack them up.
- 5
Tune anything
Standard, drop D, DADGAD, open G, plus a handful of stranger ones. The fretboard relabels itself, the chord engine recalculates, and the audio retunes the strings so a C shape in DADGAD actually sounds like a C shape in DADGAD.
- 6
Themes, because eyes
Light mode for the cafe, dark mode for the studio, both following your system by default and remembered between visits.
- 7
It runs in your browser
No install, no login, no downloads.