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Know Your Fingerboard

by Larry

If you follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed that I broke my nail and was relegated to work on my flatpicking skills until my nail grows back. I thumbed through my Acoustic Guitar Magazine’s and found some great exercises for learning scale patterns and mixing them up to better my soloing.  The only problem is that I wanted more than what the magazine was giving me.

A couple of nights ago, I came across a site called GuitarCardio.com and I’m loving it.  It’s a scale exercise program where you choose a key (or all keys), select a difficulty level and a starting place for the scale.  A series of scales will then be given for you to work on.  It’s like a workout plan for you fingers, hence the name “cardio”  I’m thinking.  The dynamic nature of this system sings to me because I’m not getting bored with the same scales over and over again.

This program is still in it’s infancy so there are some drawbacks like the scales don’t cover the entire fingerboard, lack of customizability and no metronome, to name a few.  Brad Heintz, the creator of GuitarCardio.com addresses bugs and feature requests in his blog and  has great plans to extend the features and functionality of this program.  So maybe we’ll see scales over chord changes and modes in upcoming versions.

Check out the site and give it a whirl and let Brad know what you like and would like to see at GuitarCardio.   Brad is open to suggestions and critiques which should make this program the best it can be.

Keep Practicing!

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3 comments

Brad July 10, 2008 - 3:16 pm

Larry – Thanks for the link and the kind words. The response to GuitarCardio has been incredible and deeply gratifying, and I do plan on doing my best to live up to people’s hopes for the site.

I have a pretty demanding day job, so the new features won’t be coming at a fast and furious pace, but as you say I am listening to the commenters on my blog and will be focusing on new features that will make GuitarCardio the most useful for the most visitors.

Thanks again, and I hope to see you back soon!

Reply
MacNichol Guitars July 11, 2008 - 1:30 pm

Great site!

Any plans for a http://www.mandocardio.com?

Reply
Brad July 13, 2008 - 7:43 am

Not yet, but it wouldn’t be hard to adapt what I have already…

Hmm…

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