This post is about two of my favorite subjects:  software and guitar.  I had been playing guitar for quite a while before I learned what a scale was.  I always played by ear and just accepted that for some songs, certain notes fit and other didn't.  Later in life I discovered that there was actually some reason behind determining the right notes and scales for a given progression and vice versa.

There's lots of software tools out there for learning scales (and modes) and finding the patterns on a guitar fretboard.  There's also lots of software that can chart out thousands of guitar chords.  What I always wanted was an easy way to, given a particular key, show all the chords that could be used and overlay them both on the fretboard.  The major and minor variations are usually pretty easy to figure out but beyond that, it was always hunt and peck for me.  So... I decided to write some software that would do it for me.

I've also been watching Silverlight as it has progressed along.  Version 2 was recently released (www.silverlight.net) and I'd say it's pretty mature in it's current form.  Early releases of this version were used for streaming video for the 2008 Olympics.  The really cool thing about it (aside from the fact that you can write in C#) is that the presentation model is the same for Silverlight as it is for WPF (Microsoft's new UI model for Windows apps).  The other cool thing is that it's more vector based rather than pixel based so scaling to different resolution devices should be easier.  But it's definitely a different way to think about building UIs.  You can build a rich client app that uses web services and WCF to talk to the back end.

So... my scale/chord applet was written in Silverlight using Visual Studio 2008 and C#. You can check it out online at http://www.keenesoftware.com/Samples/SilverFrets.aspx.

Enjoy!