About FretTrain

Welcome aboard The FretTrain! My name is Rodney, and I'm thrilled you're here. I started playing guitar in 1989. I remember tuning my guitar with a chromatic tuner and watching the notes change as I moved up the fretboard. Like most players, I memorized the "important" positions—I knew the open strings and I knew where G was! I later decided that I wanted to know all of the notes on the fretboard. So, I began memorizing them which led to learning patterns, intervals, and seeing how all the chords and scales connect together. This was a turning point! It didn't impress people, but it enabled me to understand what I was playing and hearing.

I think it is incredibly important to memorize the fretboard, and know some music theory (which I used to just call 'chord families,' haha!). It doesn't really matter what you call it, but if you can understand it and communicate with other musicians it's worth learning! I'm surprised to learn that so many people will progress greatly as a musician, but never learn the fretboard. I think this is a huge handicap, and it's not as hard as people think.

I started building FretTrain simply to help my son learn the fretboard notes. What I discovered, though, was that having a program map out any note, interval, scale, and triad on every string, in any tuning, on any instrument, is an extremely powerful and useful tool!

I am also learning to play Pedal Steel Guitar. I do not have one yet, but it is ordered and in production now. This was a way for me to create a tool to study how the fretboard changes with different pedal and knee lever combinations. The fact that you can choose any triad or scale and light up the whole fretboard no matter what the tuning is, is exciting! I hope you enjoy this app as much as I enjoyed creating it. If you have any feedback or suggestions, please let me know! This is a very new project, started in early 2026. Please use the form below to let me know if you have any issue, find any inaccuracies, or have any suggestions or comments.