The next big update for AudioTheory Guitars arrives today. It's a remake of sorts – a full reworking of the chord and scale sections of the app. AudioTheory Guitars was originally built around the concept of an app that ran in a single-screen view, and the whole point was to see everything on-screen at once. However, post-launch I hastily added in popups to see chords and scales that could then be loaded back into the main screen.

Fast forward seven years and the app as a whole has become more complex and more customisable. Whilst the chord and scale sections were upgraded along the way, they still felt supplementary to the main view. The goal with this update has been to create dedicated chord and scale tools that are useful in their own right.

New Chord Library + Inspector

Chords now display in a scrollable area in the middle of the screen. Meanwhile the bottom keyboard section persists as per the main view. Chords can be filtered and sorted relative to a scale, or the custom subsection of notes applied using the note selector.

The library includes new chords too. There's a new tab for triads and also for extended chords (Jazz chords such as 11 and 13th chords etc). The cycle button now also cycles through chord inversions for supported open chords and triads.

Each chord now has a new information 'i' icon that will be familiar to owners of AudioTheory Piano Keys. This clicks through to the Guitar chord inspector – a dedicated view that includes a larger chord diagram and information about the chord (degrees, movable do, chord type). The chord itself can also be swapped directly when the padlock (top right) is 'unlocked'.

Guitar Scale Viewer

Scales are now viewed using a new fretboard diagram. Select the scale properties from the drop-downs and the diagram and details (degrees, movable do, roman numerals etc.) will update. In this view the scale root notes are highlighted, and there's options to play the scale notes with a selection of parameters to control how this works.

New Instrument Effects

We have brand new electric guitar and acoustic guitar instrument effects. These have been recorded by myself using real guitars (the electric guitar sounds come from a Fender Telecaster and the acoustic a Fender San Miguel). As well as resulting in a better tone, every fret now has its own individual recording. This means that the sound of an A2 note on the 5th fret / 6th string is not the same as you'll hear for the open A2 on the 5th string.

Theme Changes

The light theme has been updated to now support the chord library, and scale viewer, as well as the new chord inspector. There's a few more subtle changes across the main view too. The two alt. dark themes also have different backgrounds in the chord library, and scale viewer. The changes here too are fairly subtle, but mean that overall each theme is now more distinct across every part of the app.