Month: February 2015

2015 Upgrade – new look and new site

Am very pleased to announce the new Chordbook.com website major site upgrade. Its been a lot of hard work but think its really worth it. Here are a few of the new features.

New Look and Feel

Have done a complete redesign, responsive to desktops, phones and tablets, a shiny new logo. Expertly redesigned Acoustic and Electric guitar visuals. Toyed with light or dark background but eventually felt that the dark was easier on the eye after long periods. A huge thanks to Craig Russell from Red Sun Design, Glasgow for the new design and theme and general amazing creative input.

Chordbook.Com logo

The user interface is now much cleaner and more intuitive. The guitars more realistic.

Guitar Chords

The guitar chords section has expanded greatly. As well as the new design, there is now a Pick button, so you can hear the guitar pluck away the chord and repeat.

The ‘MyChords’ feature for saving your chords to your device has been given its own page.
You can do all you did before but its much easier to delete, re-order and play about with the chords once they are in the sequencer.

There is now a whole series of pages on the different guitar chord types with examples.

New Guitar Samples

We completely upgraded the sounds you here on the site, by creating our own sample sets for acoustic and electric guitar.

Learn Guitar

A brand new section, to help guide guitarists through all the normal hurdles one comes up against when getting better at an instrument, we have some brand new guitar lessons on video.

Also we have several new articles about some essential basics of chords and music theory.

Guitar Settings

The flyout menu on the right allows you to choose your guitar, acoustic or electric, set your volume, set the speed of strumming and picking the guitar and choose between left or right handed guitar. These features work across the whole site.

Support for iPad and Tablets

This was a very popular requested feature and we now are pleased to say we fully support iPad’s and Tablets with our 2015 website upgrade.

Guitar Web Applications

The “web app” pages, like guitar chords, scale and tuner fit very nicely onto an iPad in portrait mode.

Flash Not Required

Flash is no longer required, but still supported.

Mobile Devices

The site is now fully responsive for desktops, tablets and mobiles. On the “app” pages I am going to have to do more work to fit the controls into the screen, but that is coming soon!

 

Guitar Audio Samples

Had a great time creating the new samples for the site. Here’s how I did them.

Acoustic Guitar – Martin D28

Martin D-28 Acoustic Guitar

Tried to do this in my home studio, but until you make your first sample set, you don’t realise how quiet the environment needs to be, or how much background noise, however light is going on. Even tried doing this in early hours of the morning but just one car going past on the main road would mean a ruined take of a string as it got quieter.

Eventually decamped to a local studio and finished off there, even then we had to retake a few when somebody closed a door heavily in building next door.

For this particular use, unlike a normal sample set, I just had one set volume. Tried to be as consistent as possible, but think there is a certain “character” in the mix of sounds we got.

This is well seasoned (over 30 years old) and played in guitar as you can see and really pleased with the end result.

Electric Guitar – Fender Toronado

This was much easier, just DI into my recording gear, then season with some amp plugins and various eq and fx at the mixing stage.

Mixing/Mastering

audio waveform

Both acoustic and electric guitar sample sets were expertly mixed/mastered at Surrealis Sounds Studio in Berlin by Jörg Surrey. Job done.