One of the things i always wanted to develop is my ability to work out the scale from a riff id made. On my search i found a great little app from for free which helps you find the scales on your guitar neck -http://cyberflotsam.com/phatphish/
Its free (although blatantly worthy of a donation) but is unfortunatly only available for the windows. UPDATE - the developer has responded and created a beta web version for everyone else o/
Here is the write up and you can dload it from the links above.
Using PhatPhish you see where to find notes on a guitar neck for pretty much any scale you'll ever find yourself wanting to play. There are some neat features, such as:
- Comprehensive database of scales, split into categories
- Highlight specific notes from the scale
- Annotate the notes from the scale
- Support for any alternative tuning of your choice
- User-configurable display options, including 12 or 24 fret neck
- Playback options so you can hear what a scale sounds like, including interactive 'plectrum mode'
- Now includes 'RiffBuilder' which allows you to build your own patterns from a scale
It is distributed as Shareware for the Microsoft Windows operating system. It has no special hardware requirements - if your PC can run Windows then it should be happy enough running PhatPhish. However, if you want to get the most out of the audio side of it, then a good soundcard will be a bonus.