Fret1 Blog

The Chord Progression Maker has now been released.

Don’t know what to chords to play?
Want to write a new song?
Playing the same old guitar chords?
This tool can help you inspire you!

Simply select a key and a chord progression and then strum away on your guitar. This can be used as a great starting point for your songs or easy inspiration for a tune.

The chord progression maker shows the chords to play as well as the notes that make up that chord. You may want to use the notes as a basis for creating a picking out a melody on your guitar over the top of the progression.

The progressions use the common roman numeral system to represent the note in a key independent fashion. The lower case numbers are minor, upper case major.

The C Major scale is:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
C D E F G A B C

So a I-IV-V progression in C is the C, F & G chords. That is the first, fourth and fifth notes in a C Major Scale use to create the major chords (as the roman numerals are all upper case).

It’s easy to play around with the chords and hopefully this will prove a useful starting point for your compostions.

So check out the Chord Progression Maker now and leave a comment with suggestions for improving this music tool.

Some big changes to the Chord Finder tool have been made.
Firstly the amount of chords available has grown significantly.

Now fifth (power chord), sixth, seventh, diminished, augmented, and suspended chords are all supported.

Secondly the choice of scales has been increased.

Harmonic Minor as well as both Major and Minor pentatonics have been added.

Of course all these chords and scales can be viewed together as well as the existing modes. The different possibilities are endless, just limited by your imagination. You can use the Chord Finder tool to view chords, scales and modes simultaneously on the fretboard.

The Chord Finder has been refreshed.

You can now select as below
Key

• C
• C#
• D
• D#
• E
• F
• F#
• G
• G#
• A
• A#
• B

Type

• Chord
• Scale
• Mode

Parameter
when Chord or Scale is selected:

• Major
• Minor

when Modes is selected:

• Ionian
• Dorian
• Phrygian
• Lydian
• Mixolydian
• Aeolian
• Locrian

And of course you can choose the color for the selection. If you have a comment or suggestion about the guitar chord finder write something below, thanks.

If you want to databind some class to the CombBoxBox in Silverlight you can run into a problem if you want to have some items disabled.

When you add an ItemsSource all items are wrapped inside a ComboBoxItem. To access the IsEnabled property of the ComboBoxItem can be problematic.

In WPF you can set a style and apply it to the ComboBoxItem, but in Silverlight the Value of a Setter cannot be a Binding. The solution is to extend the ComboBox class itself and override the GetContainerForItemOverride method. This way we can insert our own ComboBoxItem with the additional binding in code:

namespace ExtendedComboBox
{
    public class BindableComboBox : System.Windows.Controls.ComboBox
    {
        protected override DependencyObject GetContainerForItemOverride()
        {
            ComboBoxItem cbi = new ComboBoxItem();
            // Bind using the "Enabled" property on the Animal class
            Binding enabledBinding = new Binding("Enabled");
            enabledBinding.Mode = BindingMode.OneWay;
            // Bind it to the IsEnabledProperty of the ComboBoxItem
            cbi.SetBinding(ComboBoxItem.IsEnabledProperty, enabledBinding);
            return cbi;
        }
    }
}

combobox.zip

Steve of PokerCopilot fame has an interesting blog post about his traffic from Google.

Basically most of the traffic is from low volume unique phrases.

While obviously more visitors are better, it seems like most people concentrate on the front page assuming that’s where visitors will enter. Should we be looking to improve the blog to product funnel? The most common is usually a sidebar link to the main webpage, but how many people read sidebars, never mind click on them.

I haven’t seen much about optimising this, if you’ve got any further info or ideas on this I’d love to hear them.