I keep a running list of everything that's changed since the last app update. It sits in a text file and I add to it whenever I finish something.
I opened it this week to see how close I was to pushing an update out.
Almost nothing on that list is visible.
Two months of work. Fixes, corrections, small refusals to leave something slightly wrong. If you opened Fretscape today you'd struggle to point at much of it and say that's new. One thing, maybe, and only if you were looking. I'll come to that.
So this is the post about the invisible bits. Because they're most of what I've been doing, and one of them is the sort of thing I'd want to know about if I were you.
The labels that were lying
Fretscape labels every shape it shows you. Beginner, intermediate, advanced. It works out how far your fingers have to stretch, whether you're barring, how many fingers you need, whether the shape puts your hand somewhere awkward.
That label matters more than it looks like it does. A beginner sees beginner, tries the shape, can't play it, and quietly decides the problem is them.
While I was building something bigger - more on that further down - I did something I'd never actually done before. I took every shape the new pages would show and lined it up against what the engine genuinely thinks of each one. Side by side. All of them at once.
Fifty-eight disagreed.
Not wrong shapes. Correct shapes, playable shapes, but wearing the wrong label. The page was going to say beginner for grips the engine grades as harder than that. Cadd9. B7. E6. Am6. C9. Csus2. The whole diminished and half-diminished family, with those alternating two-fret grips that look tidy on paper and feel like nothing of the sort.
Fifty-seven of them are fixed.
The fifty-eighth still disagrees with itself and I haven't settled it yet. It's on the list. I'd rather tell you it exists than quietly round it down.
Here's the part that bothered me. Nothing was broken. Every shape was correct, every grade was reasonable, and the two halves of the system had simply drifted apart without anyone noticing. It took building a completely different thing to see it.
A label a beginner can't trust is worse than no label at all.
That's the whole every hand idea, really. The tool is supposed to bend around you. It can't do that while it's quietly telling you a barre chord is beginner-friendly.
Names, keys and small corrections
The rest of the list is this sort of thing, over and over.
Slash chords are spelled properly now - the bass note gets the name it should have rather than the one that fell out of the maths. If you've asked for sharps, you get sharps, all the way through, instead of sharps in one place and flats in another. A few chords that have two honest names now show you both instead of picking one and hoping.
The key detector reads progressions better than it did. Borrowed chords confuse it less. Inversions get their proper roman numeral rather than being flattened into the chord underneath them. And it's quicker to admit when a progression genuinely could be two things.
None of that is exciting. All of it is the difference between a tool you trust and a tool you double-check.
Three pixels
I redrew every chord diagram in the app. Old on the left, new on the right.
Four things changed. Only the first one is obvious at a glance.
The board is now a shade darker than the page behind it. That's it, that's the whole change. But the old one was lines drawn on paper and the new one is an object sitting on a table, and I don't fully understand why that works as well as it does.
Once the board reads as a surface, everything on it has to read as sitting on top. So the frets got heavier - more than twice the weight they were. They used to be hairlines, which is what you draw when you're ruling a grid. A fret is a length of metal wire standing proud of the wood, and now it looks like one.
The strings are drawn properly too. On a standard set the low three are wound - wire wrapped round a core - and the high three are plain. They don't look alike on a real guitar and they shouldn't look alike here. The old diagram drew six lines and made the bottom three a bit fatter. The new one draws the wound ones hollow, with a lighter middle, so they read as strings with some body to them rather than thicker versions of the same line.
And the strings now run past the nut and off the top, so you're looking at a window onto a neck instead of a box with lines in it.
They overhang by three pixels. Not four. At four they'd just touch the little circle that marks an open string, and the whole thing would look faintly wrong in a way nobody could put their finger on.
You can see all of it. I just don't think any of it is what you'd have asked for. Nobody was ever going to write in about the three pixels - but somebody would have noticed the four.
The help assistant reads the actual help now
Fretscape has a small assistant that answers questions about how the app works.
It has always known the basics - what Fretscape is for, how to get started, what the app does - because that much is built into it. Everything past the basics was a different story. Ask it something properly specific and it would tell you, politely, that it didn't have detailed guidance on that. Which was true. It didn't. It was working from a handful of notes I'd written early on and never got round to replacing.
It reads the real thing now. The help articles, the blog, the product pages - it goes and finds the relevant one and answers from that, rather than from the short version of the world it used to carry around.
I'd rather it said plainly when it doesn't know than guess. That part hasn't changed. It just has to say it a lot less often.
While I was in there I found a second thing. If you asked a question in French, or Spanish, or Japanese, you'd sometimes get an English answer back. The app speaks over thirty languages and the assistant was quietly defaulting to mine. Also fixed.
It's faster
The site was slower than it should have been, particularly on a phone, particularly on the first load.
That work's done. Pages arrive quicker and they settle when they arrive, instead of shuffling about while the last few pieces land and moving the thing you were about to tap. If you've ever gone to press a button and had it slide out from under your thumb, that was me. Sorry.
Nothing to look at. You'll just notice less.
The bigger thing
Now the part that isn't a fix.
Right now, to look up a chord in Fretscape, you have to make an account. It's free, it takes a moment, and it's still a door standing in front of a person who just wants to know what notes are in Emaj7♯11.
I've been building the version with no door. A page for every chord, open to anyone, nothing to sign up for.
Not a picture of a chord box scraped into a page. The same engine that runs the app, so the notes are right, the spelling is right, the difficulty label is one you can trust - see above - and the alternative shapes are real alternatives, chosen because they suit different hands rather than because they filled a grid.
It's a lot further along than it was. It is not finished, and I'm not going to tell you when it will be. I've watched enough people announce a date and then spend the next three months resenting their own project, and I like this one too much for that.
But it's the reason the last two months look empty from outside. Nearly all of that work happened over there, and the best thing it's given me so far is a full-length look at what Fretscape actually says about every chord it knows - which is how the difficulty labels got caught in the first place.
The rest of it, you'll see when you see it.
Meanwhile
If you want to poke at something today, the chord identifier is already open to everyone, no account needed. Give it a handful of notes and it'll tell you what you've played, and how sure it is.
Everything else is in the app, free to start.
Two months. The diagrams sit a shade warmer, and a chord label moved one word to the right.
Small decisions are the product. Thanks for reading.
