Without further ado I present the Barkhausen Effects – Guitar Notes in Scale tool. It supports all of the common Western music modes (Ionian, Dorian, etc.) as well as pentatonic and blues scales, plus some less common scales such as the Algerian, Roumanian Minor, and my favourite (name-wise, anyway) the Enigmatic.

From the top left menus you select the Key and the desired Scale, and the fretboard will display the scale. You can also highlight a specific Interval of the root note, or simply highlight a specific Note (if the specified note is not in the currently displayed scale nothing will happen). The All and Reset buttons are hopefully self-explanatory.

This came about while experimenting with a JavaScript library called D3 that supports animating a Scaleable Vector Graphics (SVG) image I thought I’d try to use it to create a tool that can graphically display the notes of any scale on the guitar fretboard. Being SVG you can zoom as small or large as you like without losing quality. D3 is the software library used to create Cameron Beccario’s rather beautiful rendering of the current earth’s weather, simply called Earth. Until I got involved with weather data I didn’t know that circling Antarctica are a ring of massive cyclones called the Polar Vortex. If you look at the bottom of the Earth you can see them — ever changing shapes and sizes but always there, spinning away.

I hope you find the Guitar Notes in Scale tool helpful. If there’s a scale missing that you’d like to see included, drop me a line at barkhausen [at] barkhausen.nz.