Welcome to At-Etudes

At-Etudes is a small system for making music study materials — and this site is its public home. Five interactive studies are live today, and they fall into two groups.

The études

An étude here is something you build, not something you read. You pick the key, the cycle, the strings and the shape; the app works out the voicings that move as little as they have to, shows them on the neck, the staff and the keyboard, plays them, and keeps a log of what you practised. The three below share one engine, and they go in this order for a reason — each one is the last one with more voices.

• The Metro Journal — the click every étude carries, standing on its own: three voices, tap tempo, accents, subdivisions, and a notepad that saves an idea next to the tempo it arrived at. Start here and it will feel familiar inside the other two.
• Triadetudes — the Triad Étude Designer — three voices. Three pivot notes anchor triads cycling through a progression with minimal movement. Fretboard, notation, playable keyboard, metronome, practice log.
• Tetradetudes — the Tetrad Étude Designer — four voices. The same idea one note wider: close, drop-2 and drop-3 chords walking a cycle, arpeggiated or enclosing a target tone.

The maps

These two came first and work differently. They are maps rather than designers — the material is fixed and you explore it, rather than building something of your own. There is no étude to design, nothing to practise against, nothing to save. They share the colour language and the single-file promise, but they are not part of the étude family, and that is on purpose: they answer a question you have once, where an étude is something you come back to.

• Modes from Pentatonic Boxes — every mode is a guitar pentatonic box you already know, plus two notes. Pick a key, flip between hearings, and hear any note by tapping it.
• Tetrad Voice Leading — Cycling Through a Scale — four-note chords walking through a scale one smooth voice-leading move at a time, shown on a guitar neck and a keyboard at once.

Generated, not drawn

Nothing on these pages was placed by hand. Every dot on every fretboard, every voicing on the keyboard, is derived by code from a handful of musical first principles — and every derivation runs through an assertion suite before a page is published. If a chart and the theory ever disagreed, the build would fail rather than ship the chart. That’s the deal behind the whole system: the pages you see are the output of a proof, not an illustration of one.

One color language

All studies share a single visual convention: color means scale degree, always relative to the current root. Root is red, the third is blue, the seventh is amber — whether you’re looking at a pentatonic box or a drop-2 voicing. The colors are a teaching instrument, so the site is careful with them: they appear only where they mean musical function, never as decoration. (That’s why the links here are plain ink.)

Self-contained by design

Each study is a single HTML file with no external dependencies. Download one and it keeps working offline, complete with interactivity and sound. Bookmark it, keep it on a tablet on the music stand — it’s yours.

More studies are on the way. This blog will track what lands and how it’s built.