Follow the Chords teaches chord tone soloing on guitar. Learn to find the arpeggio notes hiding inside the scale shapes you already know so every note you choose sits in tune with the chord sounding underneath.
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The chord tones of the current chord, lit inside the scale shape.
The band is playing, the groove is good, your hand is moving. Then the chord changes underneath and one note comes out sour. Not slightly off. Properly wrong. You bend away from the note, hope nobody noticed and carry on, a little more cautious than before.
That moment is not about technique. Bends are in tune, timing is fine, the shape under your fingers is correct. What went wrong is note choice. Nobody ever showed you which notes belong to which chord, or how to find those notes while the music keeps moving.
The problem is not a lack of scales. The problem is that nobody has taught you where each chord tone sits under your fingers, or how to reach for the right chord tone without stopping to think about the theory.
The key tells you the seven scale notes. The chord tells you which three or four of those seven scale notes actually fit right now. Most guitarists only ever learn the first of those two.
Inside one chord you sound fine. Then the bar turns over, a new chord arrives and the note you are on stops fitting. The wrong notes nearly always land in the first beat of a new chord.
You can play the scale up and down at speed. Then the song starts, the chords move and none of that practice helps, because a scale never told you which of its notes belongs to which chord.
Every chord is built from a handful of notes. Play one of those notes at the moment that chord sounds and the result is consonant, settled and musical. Land on the third and the phrase takes on the colour of the chord, bright for major and dark for minor. Land on the seventh and the phrase leans forward into the next chord. Land on the root and the phrase comes to rest. Choosing between those options is the difference between a solo that wanders and a melody that means something.
Follow the Chords trains the eye, the ear and the hand to find those notes inside the scale shape already under your fingers.
You start with one arpeggio inside one CAGED shape and finish improvising over changing harmony with nothing on screen to help you.
Start with one CAGED shape and one chord. Learn where the root, third, fifth and seventh sit inside that shape until the arpeggio is as familiar as the scale around each note. Every arpeggio is taught in the context of the CAGED shape that contains the arpeggio, so nothing has to be relearned in a new position later.
Two chords, then four. The backing engine plays a progression while the fretboard display shows which notes belong to the chord sounding right now. Your job is to land on a chord tone as each chord arrives. Pitch detection listens to what you actually played and tells you whether the target note was hit.
Arpeggio patterns, intervals, melodic permutations. Learn to approach a chord tone from above, from below, from a step away or from a leap, so lines have shape and direction instead of sounding like note-spelling.
Load a progression from the library or build your own in the editor. Choose a key, choose a tempo, play. By this stage the arpeggio notes are visible to you whether the fretboard display is switched on or not.
Every drill is graded and put in order. The plan marks the one drill worth doing next. Each drill says which drill comes before it and which drills follow. No drill is ever locked: the order is a suggestion and every drill plays the moment you press the drill. No more opening the app and wondering what to practise, which is how most practice time actually gets wasted.
Guide tones alone. Root ban. Never twice the same. Stay on the shared note. Each drill removes one option so a single skill has nowhere to hide, which is how the hard parts actually get learned.
Most practice tools take your word for it. Follow the Chords listens and marks every change: hit, missed or late. Your practice record is built from what you played, not what you meant to play.
Every drill works in every key. Learn a concept in G, then move to E flat without starting again.
Arpeggios are taught inside each of the five shapes, which is how fretboard fluency is built. Once the C shape arpeggio and the A shape arpeggio connect, the whole neck opens up.
Triads first, then sevenths, ninths, elevenths and thirteenths. Learn what each extension sounds like and when to reach for each one.
Short, focused exercises that build on each other. Each drill has one job.
Play over standard progressions from blues, rock, pop, jazz, funk and folk, or type in the chords to the song you are learning this week.
Real chord voicings at any tempo, in any key, with any progression. Practise slowly, then bring the tempo up.
Choose the chord tone to land on, choose how to approach that chord tone, choose the rhythm to carry the phrase. Then transpose the finished phrase into every key across all five shapes.
The app listens through your microphone and tells you which notes you played, so practice sessions produce feedback instead of guesswork.
Works in the browser on laptop, tablet or phone. No app store, no download.
Backing engine, fretboard display and pitch detection on one screen.
A chord tone is only useful if your hand can reach that note in time. What separates a player who thinks about theory from a player who simply plays is the feel for distance on the neck. A minor third down. A fourth across two strings. A semitone below the target. Follow the Chords teaches every arpeggio note as a distance from wherever your finger already sits, rather than as a dot on a diagram to be memorised.
Intervals are also what tie the scale and the arpeggio together. The arpeggio is not a separate shape sitting on top of the scale. The arpeggio is the set of notes within the scale standing at particular distances from the root, which is why one interval learned in the C shape carries straight into the A shape and every other position.
Once distance becomes instinctive, hunting for the right note stops. You hear the note first, then the hand goes there.
Playing an arpeggio from root to seventh and back down again is spelling, not music. Sequences turn that raw material into something worth listening to.
Play the arpeggio in thirds. Start from the seventh and descend. Take four chord tones and reorder those four notes into every permutation until each order sits comfortably under the fingers. Move a three note figure up through the scale so every repetition lands on a different chord tone. Take one small shape and shift that shape across the strings, across positions, across the whole neck.
Sequences do two jobs at once. Musically, sequences give a solo shape and momentum, because a listener recognises a repeating figure and follows where that figure goes. Technically, sequences build fretboard fluency faster than anything else, because the same handful of notes gets approached from a dozen directions instead of one.
Follow the Chords teaches sequences against real chord changes rather than in isolation, so a pattern is never practised as a finger exercise. Every repetition has to land on a chord tone of whatever chord is sounding at that moment, which is the point where technical work turns into music.
You can play. Bends are in tune, timing is solid, the minor pentatonic shape is second nature. What frustrates you is that solos come out sounding the same over every chord in the progression. Every so often a note lands badly enough to make you wince.
Follow the Chords is built for exactly that stage. Beginners will find the material demanding. Players who already spell arpeggios across the neck at tempo will find the early drills too easy.
Chord tone soloing is not a jazz technique. B.B. King targeted chord tones. So did Steve Cropper, Jerry Garcia, Nile Rodgers and Django Reinhardt. The principle is the same whether the progression is a twelve bar blues, a funk vamp, a folk tune in drop D or a set of jazz changes.
Follow the Chords teaches note choice. Phrasing, tone and taste stay yours.
Every plan includes all four stages, every drill, all twelve keys, the progression library, the lick writer, the backing engine and pitch detection. Nothing is held back for a higher tier.
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Every plan starts with a 7 day free trial, so you can work through the early drills before paying anything. No card is needed to start.
Start your 7 day free trialEvery drill has a name, a key, a tempo and a fretboard shape, so you can set a student one exact thing to work on and know the student is working on that one thing. The trainer marks every chord change your student plays as hit, missed or late, so the next lesson starts from a practice record rather than from what your student remembers practising.
Chord tone soloing is the hardest thing to teach in a thirty minute lesson, because the skill needs daily repetition against changing harmony rather than one explanation a week. Follow the Chords gives students somewhere to do that repetition between lessons.
Yes. Every plan starts with a 7 day free trial giving full access to the whole app. Seven days is enough to finish the first stage and hear the difference on a two chord drill. After the seven days, a monthly, yearly or lifetime plan keeps that access open.
That is the whole purpose. A bum note is a note that clashes with the chord underneath. Learn where the chord tones sit inside the shape and the clashes stop.
No. Everything is shown on the fretboard.
No. The theory arrives as each drill needs the theory, tied to shapes on the neck rather than to written exercises.
A guitar, a browser and a microphone. An electric guitar with an audio interface gives the most accurate pitch detection, though a laptop microphone works fine for most drills.
Yes. Every drill works on acoustic guitar.
A short pattern repeated at different starting points. Play a three note figure, then play the same figure starting one scale step higher, then higher again. Sequences give a solo direction, which is why a listener can follow a line built from sequences even at speed.
The names help, though the sound and the distance matter more. Follow the Chords shows both, so the name for a minor third arrives at the same time as the feel of that distance under your fingers.
Your next solo can follow the harmony instead of fighting the harmony. Start with one arpeggio inside one CAGED shape and build from there.
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