Hi, first of all congrats for your effort, but I think this is hitting a little bit on the HN information/app hoarder mentality for many commenters and not from people actually planning to use it. I don't think that there is an extreme amount of transfer from learning the fretboard on your website and on the guitar, as there is a different context from using your mouse to select a note on a image representation of the fretboard and on a real guitar. I don't think it wouldn't work, but it would be much better if there was an actual guitar involved, like using the microphone to identify if the user played the correct note on a real guitar.
Hey
I personally think there's at least a 90%+ transfer rate. Whether thats extreme or not is left to your judgement. When I navigate the fretboard, a LOT of my navigation is done visually (based on the dot inlays, notes from other strings etc). If you want to know how much of your fretboard navigation is visual, try playing a guitar with no inlays and you can quickly find out.
Playing this game is forcing you to use those immediate visual cues to memorize
the notes and that part transfers really well. The bit thats missing is
1) The game's perspective is artifical. Noone looks at their guitar like that. Thankfully our brains our fully capable of maintaining spatial orientation while handling perspective shift. You can stand in the middle of Manhattan , look at google maps and translate a squiggly blue line to a 3 dimensional navigation path that looks nothing like it. Fretboard navigation isnt that much different from Manhattan navigation if you think about it.
2) There's a lot that I know about my guitars from just the sense of touch. 4th string 2nd fret (E) feels very comfortable under my fingers. 3rd string 2nd fret (A) does not. The string cuts into my finger because its still thick but its not coiled. The same string on the 12th fret feels very different because of the tension and the raised action. All that sensory data associated with each note is lost when you use a poor facsimile like a computer game to substitute a real world concept. Which is why I view this as a supplement and not a substitution
Microphones...yeah...more work..more complexity for fewer gains IMHO. I view this as app as great for squeezing guitar time when you're without a guitar: Eating lunch at office desk, commuting by train/bus etc. That part gets lost with the microphone business
