About Practice Room

Practice Room is a small collection of interactive tools for learning music theory on guitar and bass. Everything here is free to use, runs entirely in your browser, and works without an account.

Who's behind it

Practice Room is run by a UK-based hobbyist musician — guitar and bass mainly, with a bit of piano on the side. The longer story is that I've spent about three decades in and around home studios, mostly as an engineer and producer. In the late 90s and early 2000s I had a handful of dance releases — small numbers, largely for the love of it — and was part of a live act called Electric Tribe, where we'd lug the whole studio out and jam our performances live on stage rather than miming to a backing track.

None of that made me a music theory expert. Like a lot of self-taught players, I picked up theory in fragments — enough to get by in a session, not always enough to see what was going on under my fingers. Practice Room came out of trying to fix that for myself.

Why these tools exist

There's no shortage of theory information online. What's harder to find is theory you can play with — interactive things that let you move a key, swap a mode, light up the notes on a fretboard, and immediately see how the shapes connect. Most resources are either static diagrams in a book or full courses behind a paywall. The tools here aim to sit in the gap: small, focused, hands-on, and free.

Each tool started as something I built for my own practice and then kept refining once it turned out to be useful. The Pentatonic Jigsaw, the Fretboard app, the Circle of Fifths, the Bass Generator — all of them began as "I wish there was a thing that did this," and now they're here in case they're useful to you too.

Built with left-handed players in mind

I'm a left-handed player, and that's a much bigger part of why this site exists than it probably looks at first glance. The Fretboard app — the first tool I built here — came directly out of the frustration of trying to learn from resources that treated lefties as a footnote. Most online tools show right-handed diagrams only. The better ones offer a "mirror image" toggle that flips the picture but doesn't really redesign anything around it. The worst don't bother at all.

The honest low point: I once gave feedback to a globally renowned guitar manufacturer about the lack of left-handed support on their online learning platform. The reply suggested — I'm fairly sure with a smile — that I could just learn to play "the correct way." I'd like to believe it was entirely a joke. But years on, that platform still has no left-handed accommodations, so the punchline turned out to have some teeth.

So every tool on this site is built with left-handed players just as much in mind as right-handed ones. In some cases, primarily with us in mind. The default view is right-handed because that's what most players are — that's a default, not a hierarchy — and a single click flips every diagram, every chord shape, every fretboard. Save your preference once and the tool remembers it from then on.

The rest of the guitar world has a tendency to treat left-handed players as a special-order asterisk. This site doesn't, and won't.

Get in touch

Spotted a bug, got a feature idea, or just want to say hello? Drop a line to admin@practice-room.co.uk.