Built by stacking thirds inside the scale itself — take every other note starting from each degree. Nothing is looked up, which is why it works for the modes and the harmonic minor as well as for the major. Each one links through to the chord shapes.
A mode is not a new set of notes — it is the same set with a different note treated as home. D dorian and C major contain exactly the same seven pitches; what differs is which one the music keeps returning to.
A scale is semitones from its root: major is 0 2 4 5 7 9 11. With the open pitches of the strings, everything follows. There is no table of shapes.
A seven-note scale uses each letter once. Assign A to G from the root, then ask what accidental each needs. F♯ major has E♯, not F.
A position is a hand-width window with at least two scale notes on every string, started on a scale note on the lowest string: one per note.
D dorian has the same notes as C major. Which note the music treats as home decides it, which is why the drone matters more than the diagram.
Pitches are easy: add the interval to the root, modulo twelve. Names are the difference between a diagram and notation. F♯ major contains E♯ because calling it F would use the letter F twice and E not at all; follow the rule far enough and you get double sharps: G♯ major genuinely contains an F𝄪, and the page says so rather than rounding it to G. Scales of five, six or eight notes cannot obey the rule, because there are not seven letters to go round, so they are spelled by pitch and labelled as such.
For a seven-note scale every fret fits, so the first attempt found one position where there are seven. What separates them is where the hand starts: first finger on a scale note on the lowest string, one position per note, matching first, second and third position. And the hand is not always four frets: a pentatonic needs a one-fret stretch, so a four-fret window returned three boxes for A minor pentatonic and five for C minor pentatonic, the same scale twice. The search now widens until every note has a position, and the caption says which reach it used.
Only which note the music treats as home. Over a C bass it is C major; over a D bass the ear hears D as centre, with a minor third and a major sixth above it: the dorian sound. The notes do not change, the gravity does. The set of chords stays the same too: the vi becomes the i and the whole thing reorients around it.
The flattened fifth added to the minor pentatonic is a passing note, not a resting one: it belongs between the fourth and the fifth and sounds wrong if you stop on it. It is also an approximation, since the pitch it stands in for is not on the fretboard at all, which is why the blues is bent rather than fretted.
Both, in that order. The boxes let you play something today; the note names let you know what you played. Switching the labels between note names and scale degrees on the same diagram is a cheap way to join the two together.
Only which note the music treats as home. Play the same seven pitches over a C bass and it is C major; play them over a D bass and the ear hears D as the centre, which puts a minor third and a major sixth above it and produces the dorian sound. That is why the drone on this page matters more than the diagram: the notes do not change, the gravity does.
Because it is. Removing two notes from the major scale takes out both of the semitone steps, which are the intervals most likely to clash with whatever chord is underneath. What is left is two notes per string in every position, evenly spread, and nothing that sounds obviously wrong. That is the whole reason it is the first scale most guitarists learn, and the reason it stops being interesting later.
The flattened fifth added to the minor pentatonic is a passing note, not a resting one — it belongs between the fourth and the fifth and sounds wrong if you stop on it. It is also an approximation: the pitch it stands in for is not on the fretboard at all, which is why the blues is bent rather than fretted.
They do not, quite — the set of chords stays the same, because the notes do. What changes is which one is the tonic and therefore how the others function. The same six chords that make C major sound like C major make A minor sound like A minor; the vi becomes the i, and the whole thing reorients around it.
Both, and in that order, is the honest answer. The boxes let you play something today; the note names let you know what you played. Switching the labels between note names and scale degrees on the same diagram is a cheap way to start joining the two together, which is why the toggle is there rather than a preference buried in a menu.
Twelve-tone equal temperament, and that your instrument is in tune with itself. The spelling rules are those of Western common-practice notation; other traditions name these intervals differently and some do not use twelve of them. The position search assumes a four-fret reach, which is a fair description of most hands in the middle of the neck and an optimistic one at the first fret.
This page has changed in 122 archived releases, but each of those was a site-wide pass, so none is attributable to this tool on its own and none is listed here. That is not a claim that the tool never changed — a release that reworked many pages at once may well have altered this one too. The changelog has them.