The Fretboard gives you a graphic demonstration of how to play the current chordshape design in the Design Panel.
If you have set a chord filter, it also indicates Overlay Labels to show you where the notes or degrees of the chord occur on the fretboard.
The green blocks show where your fingers need to be placed to make the chordshape. Mute strings (which are not played) are indicated by a dotted line as shown.
The example above shows the fretboard horizontally, with the head to the left and the bass string towards the bottom. You can change to any orientation you like with the Orientation options.
Fretboard Elements
The nut (the gray block on the left) indicates which end of the fretboard is the head of the instrument. You can also tell this from the spacing between frets, which gets smaller towards the instrument body (away from head).
Also at the left are light blue note labels, showing which notes are played by each fretted string of the chordshape.
At the other end of the fretboard (not shown here) are degree labels, showing show each note contributes to the selected matching chord in the Matching Chords list.
If any element of the chordshape does not satisfy the Searching options, it will be indicated in red, as in the example above for the string playing C# on the 4th fret. The reason for the highlighting is indicated with a short text description at the bottom of the Design Panel.
For added realism, you can hear the sound of chordshape design by hovering the mouse pointer over the fretboard and pressing the right mouse button. The pointer changes to a plectrum, which you can use for strumming.
Overlay Labels
You can set a filter to specify what sort of chordshape you want. There are several filter criteria you can use, but for designing chordshapes, the most common is a chord filter. You can specify, for example, that you want a chordshape for playing an Am7 chord.
This immediately activates overlay labels to indicate every location where the notes of this chord appear on the Fretboard. For Am7, these would appear as A-C-E-G, or as 1-b3-5-b7, depending whether you are using note or degree labels.
You can use these overlay labels as a guide to help you design a complete chordshape. Generally, you need to have each note represented at least once in the chordshape. If you are using full color overlays, each note is a different color, so this makes it an easy "design by colors" exercise.
See Also
