Creative Guitar Fundamentals — Noel Johnston
Voice-Leading Builder generates smooth, playable chord progressions that move through a Schillinger-style cycle (down a 3rd, 5th, or 7th) while keeping the common tones connected and the shapes locked to one fingering family. For every chord it shows you the fretboard grip and the notation, then lets you hear the whole thing played back.
Good voice leading — moving each line as little as possible from chord to chord — is what makes a progression sound inevitable instead of jumpy. But working it out by hand across the whole neck, in every key and inversion, is a lot of paper and a lot of erasing.
This app does it instantly. Pick a scale, key, cycle, and voicing shape, and it walks the entire cycle for you with the inversions chosen so the voices move smoothly — then shows each chord both as a diagram you can play and as notation you can read, with audio so your ear confirms what your eyes and hands are learning. It turns an abstract theory exercise into something you can immediately practice.
1. Choose a scale and key — pick from 36 scales/modes and any of the 12 keys. Every diatonic chord of that scale becomes available to the cycle.
2. Pick a cycle — Cycle 3, 5, or 7 sets how the roots move (down a 3rd / 5th / 7th). Cycle 5 is the classic ii–V–I engine.
3. Pick a voicing shape — triads, sevenths (drop-2 / drop-3 on several string sets), quartal, and open voicings. The sheet regenerates the moment you change anything.
4. Set the rotation — picture the chord's inversions (root, 1st, 2nd, 3rd) arranged around a clock face. CW (clockwise) steps forward through them as the cycle moves — root → 1st → 2nd → 3rd → back to root — so the voicing tends to climb the neck. CCW (counter-clockwise) steps backward — root → 3rd → 2nd → 1st. Across alternates between two inversions a third apart, in 4-note chords only — splitting the motion into two interlocking voices. All three keep the common tones connected; they just send the line in different directions, so try each and let your ear pick.
5. Play it — the Play button runs the progression with a piano sound at your chosen tempo, highlighting each chord as it sounds. Your ear is the final judge of good voice leading.
6. Handedness — mirror every chord diagram for left-handed players; the notation stays as written.
7. Print — a clean page with no app chrome, named automatically from the key, scale, cycle, voicing, and rotation.
Pick one voicing shape and one cycle, play it slowly, and let your hand learn the connecting motion before speeding up. Then change only the rotation, or only the string set, and watch how the same harmony re-voices itself. Comparing those side by side is where the fretboard really opens up.
This tool is a direct extension of how I teach harmony — voice leading, modes, and the fretboard as one connected map. If it's resonating, my books lay out the whole approach (The 4-Note Universe and Creative Guitar Fundamentals pair especially well with this one), and in the Creative Guitar Fundamentals class I get to work through it with players directly. Zero pressure — but fair warning, this is exactly the kind of thing I'll happily talk your ear off about at a party. 🎸
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