Thursday, September 10, 2009

Flashy Free Guitar Accessories



The above interactive Flash Animaton is a free online guitar tuner from "hotfrets".

We can click on a string, and it will sound, so that we can tune our guitar.
We can also download this tuner from the hotfrets site to our desktop.

The "hotfrets" site is located at: http://www.hotfrets.com/.

It has quite a few nice guitar learning tools, that have all been created using Adobe Flash. Some are for free, but the others require a monthly membership fee.

A cut down version of their full Tabulature writer is also supplied on the site, and shown below:







We can click on the guitar fretboard where the notes are that we want to play, and then it will write the tab for the notes underneath on the six string lines.

Try it out by clicking on the fretboard above.

A really nice thing is that once the current tabline is full, we can highlight it, and use Ctrl-C to copy it into memory. We can then Ctrl-V paste it into Notepad, and save the tab for later printing. We can clear the tabulator, continue the tab, and then copy and paste this into our notepad document. So it is indeed a very user-friendly tab writing tool.


There is also the "Progressionator" that can be used online for free, and will supply chord progressions and rythms for the standard patterns listed.

Try it out below:
(Note that you may have to use the scroll bars get it into view).
or you could just click this link: http://www.hotfrets.com/songanator.asp






There is also the "Arpeggiator" that can be used online for free, and will supply all of the notes that make up a particular chord.
The notes are shown on the neck, and can be plucked with the mouse pick.

Try it out below:
(Note that you may have to use the scroll bars get it into view).
or you could just click this link: http://www.hotfrets.com/chords/arpeggiator_free.asp






There are also a few free lessons at the site such as Eric Clapton "Cross Roads"
at : http://www.hotfrets.com/lesson_details.asp?LID=50

If you need a free online metronome then try these links:

http://www.metronomeonline.com/
http://webmetronome.com/
http://bestmetronome.com/
http://advanced.bestmetronome.com/

The advanced metronome is almost like a mini online drum machine.

The Guitar Tuner, Tab Writer, Progressionator,and how to play songs items at hotfrets have all been created using Adobe Flash. I show them to my computing students as examples of the extent of the power of Flash.

Music naturally runs in a timeline when it plays, and so Flash is well suited for graphically representing music and translating it to Guitar tabulature.

Enjoy,
Big Strumming Passy Wasabi

No comments:

Post a Comment