One of my hobbies is playing guitar, but unlike when I was a child learning the Cornet, I have never had lessons on guitar, I have learned what I know from books, and the internet, and just fiddling around. Most recently I’ve been putting a lot of effort into scales, but I’ve learned them as patterns on the fret-board instead of being able to play them off sheet music. I think both approaches are necessary (ie, knowing scales from memory, and being able to navigate them without thinking, and being able to read from sheet music). I have found that simply reading along with standard runs up and down scales that I already know doesn’t really help – I find the starting note and my muscle memory takes it from there. So, I’ve written a small program to help.
Right now it only works on linux, but I’ll probably get it working for Mac and Windows soon.
The UI is very simple: pick a key, pick a scale, choose how many octaves you want the exercise to cover, and what the bottom octave should be, and off you go.
The application generates a midi file, which you can then open up in a score editor of your choice. When I was younger I had a copy of Sibelius. These days I use MuseScore.
Right now, the application only has Major and Minor scales, but I’ll be adding a bunch more very soon.
You can download the application from the github project release page. Oh yeah, and it’s open source.
To install just download, extract, and run the install.sh script in the dist directory (using sudo or similar). You’ll need gtkmm3 installed. I built it againt 3.20.1-1, so 3.20.x will definitely be fine, realistically 3.20+ should be fine.
Comment with any issues, this is the first time I’ve released a linux application before.
guysherman.com 