Welcome to At-Etudes
At-Etudes is a small system for making jazz study materials — and this site is its public home. Two interactive studies are live today:
- 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 a Python generator 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.