Workbench

Chord Navigator, Part 1

One of the first apps I purchased on my first smart phone and still use almost daily is Guitar Toolkit, which is an invaluable tool for finding scales and chords for pretty much any stringed instrument in any tuning you could want.

One very helpful feature I didn't notice until a couple of years ago is the ability to look up a scale or mode (D Dorian, for example) and then get a list of all diatonic[^1] chords in the scale.

However... when practicing or fooling around with songwriting or composition I find apps to be quite distracting in a way that dedicated hardware is not, and that got me thinking about making a practice/songwriting/learning device for browsing scales and the chords that sound good with them.

An Adafruit Metro, 20x4 LCD character display, and a couple of potentiometers breadboarded together. The display shows the text 'D Dorian.'

[^1] Chords containing only notes in a given scale

Thu Jun 05 2025 20:00:00 GMT-0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)