Your session
"The last five minutes are not a reward. They are the reason for the other fifty-five." §68
what this is, and the settings
"Four bars at a time, and be willing to spend a whole session on eight." §64
The tune's own notes on the neck. Pick a grip and the neck narrows to its field, so you can find the same tune in another position. During playback the note you are on lights up.
The same eight bars sit in four places on this neck. Learning the second one takes a fifth of the time the first took, and it is where variation comes from. ch 15
One — read the map: every chord and the notes inside it. Two — take one bar and hear six worked examples over its chord. Three — play a whole chorus built one way. Four — the rules and the levers, for when you are on your own.
Anything sounding names itself in the gold bar at the bottom, and the red button there stops it.
Nine ways through the first chord of the tune. Pick one, hear it in place with the band behind it, then try it in a bar of your own.
Each lever takes this tune's skeleton and re-decorates it a different way. Press a lever, then Play a pass: you hear one version and see it in numbers, with the corners still underlined so you can tell what was kept. Eight passes, then change lever.
Name the lever out loud before you start.
It plays four bars of the tune; you answer four over the band. Land a chord tone at every change.
Pick a bar. Every idea below is written out for that bar's chord, in numbers, and plays in context — the bar before it, the bar itself, then the bar after — so you hear it arrive and leave.
One strategy, applied the whole way through, written out so you can read it and then leave it behind.
Each rule, worked out against this tune's own chords and skeleton — what it means here, not in general. Tap one to hear it.
Every voicing of each chord that sits on the neck. The app routes the progression by proximity — the ringed one is what it will play. Tap any other to hear it and pin it instead; tap the pinned one again to unpin.
These are the workbook's own links, taken from ARC-DB Updated All Tunes — same targets, same wording. Paste your own in any field below to override one.
The workbook's own file paths for this tune. Set the library address once below and every one of them opens.
The grip is the frame; the field is what your hand can reach around it. One fret from a frame note is tension, two is colour. §12a · §42.10
Cells
A cell repeated identically is a pattern. A cell that changes length is a phrase.
Every voicing that fits, with the routed one ringed. Tap to hear and pin.
The book, working
Short lessons with the sound built in. Each one ends at the tool it feeds.
The pictures
Everything the book draws, drawn here in the key you are in. Tap any one to hear what it shows.
The project itself. Put the files in a books/ folder beside index.html and tap the button below — or paste a link for each. Update a file in that folder and the link keeps working, so the newest version is always the one that opens.
Use your own mandolin instead
Record single notes on your instrument and the app will play every melody note with them. Roughly thirty notes is plenty — it pitches the nearest one it has.
1. Record one note at a time, let it ring, trim the silence. Any recorder works; the Voice Memos app is fine.
2. Name each file by its pitch: C4.mp3, D4.mp3, E4.mp3 … Middle C is C4, so the mandolin's open courses are G3, D4, A4, E5.
3. Put them in a folder called samples/mandolin/ next to index.html in your repository.
4. Add a file called samples/manifest.json listing them:
5. Upload the whole samples folder to GitHub with Add file → Upload files, then reload the app with Shift-⌘-R.
The same works for guitar, bass, cello and fiddle — add a block per instrument. Anything you do not supply falls back to the recorded soundfont, and then to synthesis offline.