OpenFret

Track gear, practice smarter, and level up on guitar

Music

Education

Games

Nothing inspired OpenFret, exactly. I never sat down and decided to build a platform. It started as one small thing and every piece dragged the next one out of me. The first version was an inventory problem. I had a few guitars and no good way to keep track of them, what was strung how, what tuning each one was in, the stuff you forget. So I built a little site for myself. It was literally called Axe Inventory. That was the whole idea. Then I was trying to share stems with a friend to work on a song over the internet, and the back-and-forth was miserable, so I built collaboration into it. Then I got curious about how much I was actually practicing, and on which guitar, so I added practice tracking. Once that existed, keeping it to myself felt silly, so I opened the site up for other people to log and show off their gear. After that it kind of ran away from me. I added a tuner. Then practice tools, a metronome, a chord finder, a scale-to-fretboard mapper, the stuff I was sick of opening five other tabs for. The tuner is the part that changed everything, though. To build a tuner you need live note detection, the thing has to hear what you're playing in real time. And the second I had that working, I couldn't let it go: if the site can hear me play, it can tell me whether I played the right note. I could turn practice into a game. So that's what I did. I built an RPG that teaches guitar and listens to your real guitar through the mic. I split the lessons into game systems, battle, wisdom, magic, crafting. You earn parts and craft your own guitars out of them. I added an idle layer. Then arcade modes, infinite scale runs, chord sniper, string skipping, a bunch more, the boring drills made fun to grind. The newest piece is practice jams, where I share my backing tracks, mark the key changes, and show the key live on the fretboard while you solo over it. There is genuinely a lot in this thing now. Probably more than one app should be. But I can trace every part of it back to a moment I personally got stuck, fixed it, and the fix opened a door to the next problem. A guitar inventory needed practice tracking. Practice tracking wanted a tuner. The tuner handed me note detection by accident. Note detection turned into a whole game. I just kept following the thread.