What's new on the site, October 2026

Over the last couple of weeks, I made a bunch of targeted site improvements. Several of these changes started as suggestions from people who use the site, and I'll come back to that at the end.

Signing in is one step now

Until this week, the site kept Sign in and Sign up apart, and Sign in only worked if you already had an account. So if you bought a course and then tried to sign in with your purchase email, you got "Couldn't find your account." The old "fix" was a small Sign up link that was easy to miss, and quite a few of you got stuck there.

Now there's one way in. Click Sign in and enter your email. If you've signed in before, you get a code as usual. If you haven't, the site tells you there's no account for that email yet, and entering the code creates one. Anything you bought with that email is already in My Library when you arrive.

If you tried to sign in once and gave up, please try again with the email you bought with. Patreon members can still use Continue with Patreon, exactly as before.

The practice tools now all work the same way

The tools were built one at a time, and it showed. Each had its own buttons, its own menus, and its own idea of where the settings belonged. Now they share a more unified layout. The controls you reach for every time sit at the top, and everything else lives in a Settings panel underneath that opens and closes, with a one-line summary of what's set. The site remembers whether you left it open. Every fretboard offers the same choice of 12, 15, 17, 22, or 24 frets.

That covers the Scale Visualizer, the Melodic Sequence Explorer, the Jam Track Player, the Chord Name Decoder, What Chord Is This?, the Voicing Finder, the Metronome & Drone Generator, the Guitar Tuner, and the Fretboard Trainer. The trainer keeps its settings in a pop-up, so it still fits a phone turned sideways.

The Jam Track Player

The Jam Track Player got its biggest update so far:

• The chart follows the music. It scrolls as the track plays and keeps the next line in view, so you always know what's coming.
• Repeated chords are blank bars, the way a written chart shows them, so the changes stand out.
• The fretboard can shrink to fit the fingering pattern. Choose Fit and the neck zooms to the form you're playing, with a fret on either side. I find this is much easier to use on a phone.
• It fits a phone better. The fretboard and chart no longer sit in tall empty bands on a small screen.

There's also a new guide with screenshots of every control: How to use the Jam Track Player.

Smaller changes you asked for

• Melodic Sequence Explorer: sequences can run up and back down (look for ↑↓ in the Sequence menu). A new setting, "Start and end on the root," trims the run so it begins and ends on the root of the scale.
• Scale Visualizer: a legend under the board explains each color and outline, painted in the board's own colors so it also matches in dark mode. It replaces a sentence that described colors dark mode doesn't use.
• Metronome & Drone Generator: a line under the notes explains the octave numbers in names like D3. Middle C is C4, and a guitar's open strings are E2, A2, D3, G3, B3, and E4.
• Fretboard Trainer: when you practice on one string, the trainer can ask for the notes in cycle-of-fourths or cycle-of-fifths order (Settings, then Questions). You can also turn on a hint that lights up the note after 8 seconds (Settings, then Feedback). Lesson 8-3 of Improv 101 now links straight to it for its cycle exercises.
• Older iPhones: on an iPhone running iOS 15, the site's buttons did nothing at all, from Buy and Sign in to the video controls. That's fixed.

Also new

• Comments on blog posts. Lessons already had comments, and blog posts now use the same system. Any free account can comment.
• Post types and RSS. Each post on the blog is labeled by type (lesson, essay, update, and so on), and you can filter the blog by type. If you use a feed reader, the subscribe link explains what RSS is and how to follow the blog with it.
• Fewer dead ends. A page that stalls partway through loading now tries again on its own instead of showing an error, and a Buy button whose connection drops tells you so and works on the next click.

Keep the suggestions coming

Many of the changes above began as a note from someone using the site: the up-and-down sequences, the Scale Visualizer legend, the drone's note names, the Jam Track Player guide, the trainer's cycle order and hint, and the iOS 15 fix. Sign-in got simpler because people told me exactly where they got stuck. If something on the site confuses you or gets in your way, tell me. When you're signed in, there's a Feedback button on every page, and you can always reply to the newsletter.