Monday, June 13, 2011

JGuitar.com is Just Perfect for Ukulele

About a year ago, when I was regularly posting in these pages, I wrote about some of the clever chord finder and chord namer sites (“Nothing Could Be Finder…”). As I noted in the article, the difference between a “finder” and a “namer” is that the finder allows you to enter a chord and find its position on the fingerboard, while a namer lets you plug in the notes in a box or plot them on a fretboard and tell you the name of the chord.

If you are like me and noodle around “discovering” chords on the ukulele, namers are great because they allow you to know the name (or, multiple names) of the chord you just played.

As far as I am concerned, one of the best namers out there is at Jguitar.com (according to their faq, the “J” stands for java). As I noted last June, however, you need to make some adjustments to convert the default guitar fretboard to that of ukulele. My fix back then was to start with the nut at the fifth fret and mute the two lowest strings. Effective, but it can get a bit confusing.

While I am sure the real fix was there all along, I just recently realized that you can adjust Jguitar.com’s number of strings and tunings to adapt it to different instruments. With a little tweaking, I was able to find GCEA ukulele fretboards in high-g and low-g versions. The best thing is that once you are in the Jguitar.com site, all of the other cool Jguitar.com functions, from scale finders to chord finders, will work off those revised tunings.

So go ahead and follow these links and discover what an incredibly cool ukulele site JGuitar.com really is!

Hi-G ukulele fretboard

and Lo-G ukulele fretboard

For those of you who play guitar, be sure to check out their standard-tuned guitar namer.

MBK