Playing a Track and Following the Chords

Press play on any track and it loads into the player, which stays with you as you move around the site. You can keep browsing, open a chord chart, or read a lesson without the music stopping.

What makes a transcribed track different is what appears alongside it. Play the track below and watch the right-hand column.

A slow blues groove in E minor. Press play, then read on — everything below describes what you're looking at.

The card in the right-hand rail is headed Current Chord, and it follows the track as it plays. It shows you four things at once.

The large symbol is the chord sounding right now. To its right, under Next, is the chord that's coming. Between them runs a thin progress bar that fills as the current chord runs out — a countdown, so you can feel a change arriving instead of being surprised by it. Below that is a fingering for the current chord, so you can play along without knowing the shape in advance.

At the bottom sit the Scale Suggestions: small pills naming scales that fit the chord being played. On this track, when the E minor 7 comes round, you'll see E Dorian and E Minor Pentatonic. Those aren't pulled from the track's data — they're derived from the chord's quality using standard chord-scale relationships, so they're always there. Tap one and it takes you to that scale's full chart.

On a narrow screen the same information appears in the mini player rather than a side rail, so nothing is lost on a phone.

The rail card is deliberately compact, and shows only the primary fingering. When you want the whole picture, press the expand icon in its top-right corner.

That opens the Chord Changes modal, and this is where most of the real practice happens.

It shows the same current chord and countdown, but with every voicing of that chord rather than just one. The scale suggestions become selectable — tap E Dorian or E Minor Pentatonic and the full fretboard for it is drawn right there, so you can see the notes available over the chord that's playing.

Underneath is a scrub bar with a small tick mark at every single chord change in the track. That alone makes finding a section far easier than dragging blindly through a video.

Two controls on that bar are worth the price of admission.

Loop turns the scrub bar into a range with two handles, so you can play one section over and over. The handles snap to chord changes and to your current position, so you don't have to land the pixel exactly, and each handle's tooltip shows the chord at that point — you can tell you've caught the right bar without seeking there first. Setting the start handle also moves playback there, so you're always hearing the section you're defining.

Speed drops the track to 0.75 or 0.5 of its original tempo. Combined with a loop, this is the single most effective practice technique on the site: find the four bars that keep defeating you, loop them, halve the speed, and play them until they're easy. Then put the speed back.

If a chord change marks the start of a named section, the modal flags it with a ribbon, so you can tell a verse from a chorus as you scrub.

Try it now on the track above. Loop eight bars, drop to 0.75, and play the changes until you stop having to look.