I’ve just wandered into pedal land and I wanted a way to begin to get my head around all these strings and moves. I designed this spreadsheet to be able to visually detect where relevant chords are for a particular key. There may be something out there that is similar, possibly much better… but I couldn’t find it.

I know there are so many more chords than what I’ve covered here, but it’s a decent start. Eventually, I’d like to include as many common positions as I can.

I’m going to continue to revise as needed. I thought other people might find this useful, so I decided to post it. Lemme know of any bugs or glitches. I’ve been using it for a few days and it seems to be somewhat stable.

If there are any very useful string groupings that really need to be included, let me know and I’ll add them.

It’s pretty easy to use, enter your tuning and setup in the setup area by changing the notes as needed and adding ‘+’s and or “-”’s where appropriate. Each + or - is a half step. Currently, only 3 half steps are supported and double moves on a pedal or lever are not supported. Additionally, because of the way my guitar is setup (courtesy of Jeff Surratt in Nashville) my lever titles (D,E,F,G) may not correspond with what other people call them. I’ve specified LNR, LNL etc. below them in the attempt to add clarity. After you enter your setup, you can simply change the key in the ‘Key’ dropdown and the I, IV, and V frets will be highlighted. The radio buttons simulate the pedals/levers and will change their respective notes accordingly.

If the note triad that corresponds to the sting grouping matches a defined chord, the degree of the chord (I, IV, V etc.) will be displayed as well as the notes making up that chord. Currently only three-note major, minor and diminished chords are detected. I know this is probably a major handicap, but plan on adding 6th and 7th chords in shortly. Additional chords were omitted partially because of the work involved to get them programmed (btw, according to my brain, there are 1320 unique, non-repeating, three-note permutations of the 12 notes in our chromatic scale… adding the forth note jacks up the dataset quite a bit) and also because I’m new to the instrument and don’t yet know which are the main chords I’d like to see. I’m still trying to learn all the locations of the root triad and all its inversions!!

I welcome and encourage any feedback. Enjoy.

Download Here

-bh

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 13th, 2007 at 3:13 pm and is filed under Misc., Pedal Steel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.