About

A quick introduction to Fretly.

Hi, I'm Alexander Stakenburg. I built Fretly because after almost thirty years of playing and teaching guitar, I have continued to develope a vision for an all encompassing guitar software tool I could actually use myself, to study (and teach!) from.

What Fretly is

Fretly is an interactive guitar fretboard. You pick a scale, a chord, a mode or an arpeggio, and Fretly shows you exactly where it lives on the neck: every position, every fingering, every connection between shapes. You can change the tuning, the number of strings, the colours and the labels until the board shows precisely what you want to see.

It also works the other way around. Build your own boards from scratch, collect them into practice sets, turn voicings into tab, and export clean diagrams for your students, your practice binder or your own teaching material.

Where it comes from

Fretly grew out of Fretboard Knowledge, the reference site where I've been publishing scale, chord and arpeggio diagrams for years. Those pages are static: useful, but frozen. Every time I drew a new diagram I thought the same thing: this should be alive. You should be able to change the key, flip the tuning, see the next position, and hear it. Fretly is that thought, built properly.

Who I am

I'm a jazz guitarist and full-time guitar teacher from the Netherlands. I graduated in jazz guitar from the Conservatorium van Amsterdam in 2000, I've been teaching since 1998, and since 2007 my own guitar school, Gitaarschool Ermelo, has been my main occupation. Between lessons I play live, mostly jazz and gypsy jazz, and I spend far too much time thinking about how the fretboard actually works.

That teaching background shapes every decision in Fretly. Before I went to the conservatory, nobody around me could explain how to get really good at guitar. I've spent my career fixing that for my own students, and Fretly is the same mission in software: give players the map I wish someone had handed me at sixteen.

How I think about learning the fretboard

Everything here follows one rule from my teaching practice: what you learn must have an immediate, practical use in real music. Fretly is not a theory quiz or a flashcard app. It's built the way an improvising musician thinks: intervals first, shapes as connected systems rather than isolated boxes, and always in the context of the music you're playing right now.

A diagram you can't apply is decoration. A diagram you can transpose, connect to the next position and drop into tonight's practice session is knowledge. Fretly is built for the second kind.

A few things I care about

No ads, anywhere, ever. Like Fretboard Knowledge, Fretly stays clean and focused; it's supported by its members, not by advertisers. Diagrams are precise enough to teach from and fast enough to noodle with. And the public part of Fretly gives you real substance, because the whole point is to help guitarists understand their instrument.

Get in touch

Questions, ideas, or something that looks wrong on a board? Use the contact page. I read everything, and a surprising amount of Fretly exists because a student or a visitor asked "couldn't it also do this?"