Neck Diagrams won't include feature - I'm going to create an open source version

[burnedfaceless]

I am a developer/Cyber Security major. I was a jazz studies major at the University of Alabama for three years before I transferred back home.

I requested that a particular feature be added for the diminished scale. As you may or may not know in a diminished seventh chord each note can be interpreted as a root. You move the chord up three frets and it's the same. The same applies for the scale.

In a Diminished Scale (you really should only think in terms of whole half - they're both the same scale and I haven't seen any advantage to overcomplicating it with a different root aka half whole).

In a diminished scale anyways every other root is a chord tone/potential root.

When I was getting hip to the Diminished Scale I figured out that if you assigned a color to each chord tone you see how they move around as the scale repeats itself up the neck and it allows you to have complete control of the neck.

I have reached out to Neck Diagrams about this feature and despite having a team of Engineers they won't do it.

I coded Two years of Pascal one year of C++ and one year of basic in high school. In college I've done a lot of web development.

I haven't gotten to my major classes yet, but after I complete Java I am going to create an open source version of this software.

We will add this feature because writing marker on paper is not the most efficient way to teach this concept.

If you would like to know when I finish it please email me at burnedfaceless@gmail.com.

Sincerely,
Brian Abbott

[Justin]

Hi Brian,

You're sounding a bit peeved, hopefully I can help out here!

I have reached out to Neck Diagrams about this feature and despite having a team of Engineers they won't do it.

Whoaaa, hold your horses! We rarely say we won't do something.. we'll pretty much always raise a ticket in our JIRA to consider suggestions at some point.

I've just had a look through the support ticket system and it looks like you did indeed email about 4 weeks ago so I'm embarrassed by the fact that no one has replied to you in that time, which is simply unacceptable, I can only apologise. We aim to provide top customer support and reply to emails within 48hrs so I'm not sure how your email slipped through the net, I'll be investigating..

Note however that we're not some global corporation but a small handful of folks, distributed remotely, working part time. "Team of Engineers" is a very grand notion for myself and another guy, who went AWOL earlier this year so we've had to recruit and get 2 others up to speed to get our next major release back on track!

And the unfortunate email silence doesn't mean "won't do it"! Actually, with all the details of your intended use I'm not 100% clear on what it is you're asking for.

If I've understood right, a generalised spec is that you want to be able to specify colours for certain intervals, yes?

Well this IS something that is going to be present in that major release I mentioned.. It'll allow you define colour 'schemes' for intervals that you'll be able to apply and switch between on fretboards.

However you can already already achieve this, the above will just streamline the process. You can right click a note marker and choose e.g. "Select all b3's" (faster with the keyboard shortcut!) and then set the colour you want for those notes in the Inspector.

Here's an example.. is this the sort of thing you want to do? If not please do explain further!

I haven't gotten to my major classes yet, but after I complete Java I am going to create an open source version of this software.

All the best with your studies, you're obviously a clever guy and I'm sure will do well! I suspect you maybe are underestimating just how much effort goes into software like this though.. And the coding is just one part of the whole. My passion for the product has driven me to recently quit a well paid developer job, drawdown savings and focus on ND full time to get the next major release out the door finally. Plus the arrival of our two kids has added to the challenge exponentially! I'd wager you haven't got kids yet - it's another full time job but one you can't quit lol.

Good luck and keep us posted! Hopefully the last 10 years of effort (it took nearly 2 years single handed hard graft to build 1.0) won't have been for nothing! Actually, if you scroll through those Version History pages in that link you can see how much stuff we've released in that time as totally free updates

[burnedfaceless]

Hi Brian,

You're sounding a bit peeved, hopefully I can help out here!



Whoaaa, hold your horses! We rarely say we won't do something.. we'll pretty much always raise a ticket in our JIRA to consider suggestions at some point.

I've just had a look through the support ticket system and it looks like you did indeed email about 4 weeks ago so I'm embarrassed by the fact that no one has replied to you in that time, which is simply unacceptable, I can only apologise. We aim to provide top customer support and reply to emails within 48hrs so I'm not sure how your email slipped through the net, I'll be investigating..

Note however that we're not some global corporation but a small handful of folks, distributed remotely, working part time. "Team of Engineers" is a very grand notion for myself and another guy, who went AWOL earlier this year so we've had to recruit and get 2 others up to speed to get our next major release back on track!

And the unfortunate email silence doesn't mean "won't do it"! Actually, with all the details of your intended use I'm not 100% clear on what it is you're asking for.

If I've understood right, a generalised spec is that you want to be able to specify colours for certain intervals, yes?

Well this IS something that is going to be present in that major release I mentioned.. It'll allow you define colour 'schemes' for intervals that you'll be able to apply and switch between on fretboards.

However you can already already achieve this, the above will just streamline the process. You can right click a note marker and choose e.g. "Select all b3's" (faster with the keyboard shortcut!) and then set the colour you want for those notes in the Inspector.

Here's an example.. is this the sort of thing you want to do? If not please do explain further!

All the best with your studies, you're obviously a clever guy and I'm sure will do well! I suspect you maybe are underestimating just how much effort goes into software like this though.. And the coding is just one part of the whole. My passion for the product has driven me to recently quit a well paid developer job, drawdown savings and focus on ND full time to get the next major release out the door finally. Plus the arrival of our two kids has added to the challenge exponentially! I'd wager you haven't got kids yet - it's another full time job but one you can't quit lol.

Good luck and keep us posted! Hopefully the last 10 years of effort (it took nearly 2 years single handed hard graft to build 1.0) won't have been for nothing! Actually, if you scroll through those Version History pages in that link you can see how much stuff we've released in that time as totally free updates

Wasn't peeved, I've just been influenced by Richard Stallman.

That feature is what I requested, so I have no need to create an open source version of your software.

I"m creating an interactive website that will compete with truefire jamplay and udemy. We will use your software and give you a shout out. So I'll have my teachers use your software so we will buy licenses.


This may be a feature but can you disable the intervals? The whole point of using colors is to diagram it up the neck and view how the root notes move around being that it's symmetrical. In other words to view each color as a different root.

If you get a few positions down and you see the colors you can have command of the whole scale. I don't subscribe to that whole half half whole BS. It's just one scale.


Thanks for including the feature. I'll make sure I don't have kids for a while.