More improvements for fretboard diagrams

• Feb 9, 2015 - 17:36

After messing around with the fretboard diagrams, they have a long way to go before being useful for guiarists. The diagrams themselves look nice aesthetically, however, without the ability to name them and be able to store many of them with easy recall, then it's not practical. I suggest looking at a program called MusEdit's fretboard diagram feature, chord editor, and most importantly how it stores and recalls chords for usage. It was a great program, however, development ceased a long time ago and it's full of bugs. All other notation programs have terrible fretboard diagram features so it's a good chance for MuseScore to seize this opportunity to have the best fretboard diagram editor/library out there. It could even be a commercial plugin (that I would gladly buy!)


Comments

Attaching chord symbols directly would be nice, I agree. But you *can* store as many of them as you like, in the palette, as I described earlier.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

The palette doesn't help if the chords don't have names and you can't organize them very well. I'm not criticizing, just making suggestions for improvement. If any developers are reading this, and want to earn money, perhaps it could become a paid plugin because I know not everyone will need the feature so it doesn't make sense to include it as part of the core program.

In reply to by mikec

Understood, but *if* the chords had names, the palette would be sufficient, no? You can rearrange items palette. I guess some sort of dividers could be useful to visually separate the various chords according to their root, but you can simply create separate palettes for each root, populating each with the different qualities. Or, if you prefer, separate palettes for each chord quality ("7b9", for example) populating each with the different roots. The point being, the palette mechanism itself is decent enough if the elements you add to them are useful. And in any event, if there is a need for additional organization beyond this that I am not seeing, I suspect it would be just as relevant for other palette types - no need to make it a special facility only of benefit to fret diagrams.

As for naming the chords, you can add the tooltips as described. I think the original implementation did have the chord symbol names attached to the fretboard diagrams, but at some point that appears to have been abandoned and the chord symbols were made independent (as of course they must be when entering chord symbols *without* fretboard diagrams). Seems to me that dieally, we'd support both - chord symbols that are independent of fret diagrams and chord symbols that are attached to fret diagrams.

Good request - entering chords using a standard naming convention generates the appropriate guitar fretboard diagram. Until someone finds time to do it, however, you can create a custom palette that many would find useful. I have attached just the beginnings of one such palette.

Owing to limitations regarding file attachments to posts on this forum, save this file then change the extension of from .zip to .mpal. Then Load the palette and feel free to edit it and re-post with additions improvements. Maybe have a Basic palette, a Jazz palette, etc.

Attachment Size
Guitar_Chords.zip 835 bytes

In reply to by underquark

Thank you, but I think what we may end up doing is using Qwik Chord to generate chord images and insert them into frames. With that program, we can quickly generate a bunch of chords and organize the png files into folders.. it's a work around for now..

In reply to by underquark

I probably do not grasp all the levels and implications of this topic, but a way to generate guitar fretboard diagrams from chord names, whatever instrument they are attached to, would seems to me rather odd.

OTOH, I suspect an algorithm to generate sensible fretboard diagrams for whatever arrangement of strings and tuning is not going to be trivial (thinking to reentrant tunings, for instance...).

In reply to by Miwarre

Truly automatic generation of fret diagrams from chord symbols for arbitrary stringed instruments would indeed seem a pipe dream. But a way for the user to associate manually-created fret diagrams with specific chord symbols seems doable at some point. This association could be stored in a style and/or template perhaps, and this would enable something like I saw in the video, where you type a chord symbol name and the corresponding fret diagram automatically appears. And having a pre-defined set of fret diagrams for common guitar chords - either to pre-populate the palette, or in the guitar templates, or perhaps stored within instruments.xml - isn't a bad idea, either. I'd look at it that way - a set of individually useful enhances that could work within the context of the existing design.

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