BluegrassBuddy

No install. Use it in the browser, including on a phone.

Capo, charts, scales, and a jam for bluegrass players. Guitar is the reference instrument. Bass, mandolin, fiddle, banjo, and steel play along in the mixer. The app is meant to be used as it is. Recommendations are welcome — open an issue if a chart, a capo spot, or a jam part should work differently. If there is interest in a larger site, with accounts and songs kept on a server, that can come later.

Saved in your browser only

Custom songs, capo setups, mixer settings, and notes stay in the browser you are using. Nothing is stored on a server. They do not follow you to another phone or browser, and clearing site data deletes them. On the site, open Home → Your data and export a JSON file when you want a copy. Guitar recordings stay in the browser as well, and that export does not include them.

What is on the site

Page	What it does
Home	The tools, and import/export
Capo	Capo and fretboard
Charts	Chords, ten-dollar grips, chromatics, scale tables, capo charts
Scales	Pentatonic, major, Mixolydian, and blues on the neck
Jam	Mixer and lead sheet
Songs	Traditional charts and your own
Sheet	Lead sheet
Instruments	Tuning and jam pattern for each chair

Long pages switch sections with tabs. A shared view uses ?tab=, for example charts.html?tab=ten-dollar or instruments.html?tab=banjo.

Capo math

Position 1 is the open Em pentatonic box (G major pentatonic). Capo fret = (songKey − homeKey of that box) mod 12.

Examples:

• Song in A, 1st box at the open position → capo 2 (G shapes sounding in A)
• Song in C, 1st box at the open position → capo 5 (capo 3 is the A-form / 5th box)
• Song in A, 5th box at the open position → open (that box’s home key is already A)

Working on the code

The site files are in docs/. GitHub Actions publishes that folder to Pages. To look at it locally:

npm start

Open http://localhost:18421

npm test

Push to main with Conventional Commits (feat:, fix:, chore:, docs:). feat: and fix: are what cut a release.

After the repo is on GitHub:

1. Settings → Pages → Source: GitHub Actions. The workflow cannot turn Pages on by itself. After that switch, it publishes docs/ once the tests pass.
2. Add a repository secret named RENOVATE_TOKEN (a personal access token or the Renovate GitHub App) so its pull requests can run the tests. Settings → General → Allow auto-merge.
3. semantic-release uses the built-in GITHUB_TOKEN and writes CHANGELOG.md back to main.

License

No license.