This fretboard tool was created out of lazyness, I didn't want to write out all those guitar lines and notes by hand anymore. This is the story of toFret.
I once needed to learn a couple of songs on bass guitar for a new band, playing original music.
They handed me a bunch of notes and sent a couple of youtube links to study. So I did, and I found that I had a hard time visualizing the notes positions and correlations between the tablature and the actual fretboard positions of those notes on my bass.
To begin with, I wrote down the positions of the notes on each string by hand, on a piece of paper. Midway the second song, I was already spending too much time writing down the positions on pieces of paper, when the idea started to cross my mind whether or not it would be a good idea to write a PHP script just for this purpose. So I created a pretty straight forward notes to fretboard positions script
The script converts any string of notes or chords into a map of the fretboard with the positions of the notes.
Check our guitar tab API to integrate the toFret functionality into your web site.
After learning songs from tablature for a while, I realised it would be useful to be able to extract notes from tablature and visualise the notes on the neck of a guitar. So I created the basic code for that too.
Visualizing the positions of the notes only is useful enough, seeing the order in which they should be played can only add to that. Introducing the toFret tablature player. It's goal is to visualize positions of notes during time. There is a play and a stop button. But it doesn't play sound, the focus is on the position of the note.
Midi sounds are now supported, although not perfectly.