guitar palette

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  • ⌥ Option
  • ⇧ Shift
  • ⌃ Control
  • ⌫ Delete
  • ⌦ Fwd Del

About the Guitar Palette

The Guitar Palette gives you a quick and convenient way to enter chords straight onto the fretboard. This is especially useful when you know what a chord looks like, but nothing else. Just put the dots on the neck where your fingers are and suddenly you know every name and every possible fingering. That's powerful, baby.

The FretPet disk image contains a Photoshop file you can use to make your own guitar images! Use Photoshop's Save for Web command to convert your custom image into a PNG file, then drop it in the ~/Library/Application Support/FretPet folder to install it.

Guitar Palette Features

The Fretboard

All the really good stuff in FretPet happens on the Fretboard. Be sure to have your guitar in your lap when you start playing with this palette. The default display mode uses a vertical orientation to save on screen real estate. You can switch to a horizontal display mode if you prefer.

The fretboard is displayed so that the head - or "nut end" - of the guitar is at the top of the window. Notes ascend in pitch from the "nut end" of the window to the "bridge end" (bottom shown here).

  • Fret 0 is referred to as the Open String.
  • There are 18 frets besides the open string.
  • Only 6 string guitars are supported by FretPet.
  • Conventionally the string with the lowest pitch is called the Bottom String and the string with the highest pitch the Top String. This has nothing to do with the physical orientation of the guitar.
  • Use the Guitar → Guitar Image sub-menu to choose a guitar image you like.
The Fret Bracket

Dots appear over the whole neck, showing you the many possible positions where you can play your new chord. But of course you can't play all the notes at once. The Fret Bracket allows you to choose a region of the neck in which to play your chord. FretPet finds the most complete set of notes - one note per string - to play.

  • Click and drag in the middle of the bracket to move it.
  • Click and drag either end of the bracket to resize it.
  • Click outside of the bracket to jump it to a new position.
  • The [ and ] keys also move the bracket.
Note Dots

The notes in your chords appear on the fretboard as color-coded dots in the same colors that they appear in the Chord Palette:

  1. yellow The tone is the root note of the chord.
  2. white The tone is in the current scale.
  3. gray The tone is not in the current scale.
  4. red The tone is not included in the current fingering.
  • Double-click on the fretboard to toggle a dot.
  • Triple-click to add a triad to the chord.
  • ⌥ click a red dot to override the Fret Bracket.
Blinking Dots
Blinking dots correspond to the tone at the Scale Cursor.
Fret Cursor

The Fret Cursor is indicated by a rotating box. Details about the tone at the Fret Cursor are displayed in the Info Palette.

  • Click and drag in the fretboard to move the Fret Cursor.
  • Clicking in the Diagram Palette also moves the Fret Cursor.
String Tones

The notes that correspond to each open string are displayed at the "bridge" end of the window. These will change depending on the tuning.

Select tunings from the Guitar → Guitar Tuning submenu.

Overriding the Bracket

The Fret Bracket is pretty helpful, but it isn't the lord of the Fretboard - you are! Fortunately, you are not limited to the notes FretPet chooses. You can select any dot on the neck to play as part of the Current Chord.

⌥ click a red dot to override the fingering. (Use Guitar → Unused Tonesto show red dots.) ⌥ click the dot again to revert to an automatically chosen position, if one is available.

Note that anytime you make changes to a chord or move the Fret Bracket the chord fingering is recalculated. So you'll need to redo your fingering changes in that case.