With Handlebars

About With Handlebars

With Handlebars is a tool for mastering scales and chords on the guitar. Not a chord dictionary you look something up in and close — a room you stay in, where the whole neck is visible at once and every shape you already half-know turns out to be the same handful of tones in a different place.

Most players learn the fretboard in fragments: a shape here, a box there, a scale that only works starting on the sixth string. The fragments are fine. What takes years is the map that joins them. This is the board that draws it — every tone of the chord or scale you picked, everywhere it falls, in the tuning you actually play.

What's in it

• The whole neck, any tuning. 58 chord qualities and 168 scales across 23 tunings, up to 24 frets, left- or right-handed.
• Spelling that tells the truth. Strict enharmonics, so a G♯ is a G♯ and never a lazy A♭ — because the name is what explains the shape.
• Lenses, not clutter. Narrow the board to one position, one string, the octaves of a note, or the guide tones that carry the harmony.
• Theory that shows its work. Tone roles in color, roman numerals on the diatonic overlay, the circle of fifths, and plain-language anatomy of whatever you're looking at.
• A practice room. Quizzes, pattern runs, progression playback with voice-led chords, a metronome and a tonic drone to play against.
• Real sound. Sampled guitars, so what you see you can also hear.

Every setting lives in the URL, so any board you land on is a link you can send to a student, a bandmate, or yourself next week.

Why the name?

It’s a nod to Handlebars by Flobots — a song about riding a bike hands-free, about how far raw talent can coast with nobody steering, and where that ends up. Guitar gets learned that way too: memorized grips, borrowed licks, shapes that work right up until the song turns underneath you. This tool is the opposite gesture. With handlebars means hands on the controls — knowing why a shape works, where the next tone lives, and which way to lean when the harmony moves. It’s your journey through music; you do the steering.

Who builds it

With Handlebars comes from the Anunnaki Cosmo Crew — calm, capable software, crafted to last. We build tools we want on our own machines and keep sharpening them long after they work: SliceFocus for visual day planning, LexiPower for vocabulary, and now a fretboard that finally holds still long enough to be learned. The crew is on the web at anunnakicosmocrew.github.io, moving to cosmocrew.dev.

The music theory behind the board is its own open library, written from first principles rather than lifted from anywhere — degrees, spellings, voicings and all — so the app only has to draw what the theory already knows.

Both halves are open source under the MIT license: with-handlebars is the theory core, and with-handlebars-web is this app. Found a bug, or curious how the board thinks? The code is right there.