I'm a web developer and guitarist, and I built FretMind because when I hit a problem in my practice, my instinct is to code it. I want to build the tool I would have wanted when I was learning alone from a book, and it means I'm not limited by what other apps offer: if something is missing, I build it.
I had a classical guitar around age 6. My dad bought me a self-teaching book, convinced I would figure it out on my own, but I couldn't make it click. No feedback, no one to tell me whether I was getting better, and the gap between "this sounds wrong" and "this sounds right" felt impossible to close alone. Then the cat knocked the guitar off the top of a wardrobe and that was that.
I bought an electric and a folk guitar 17 years ago and tried again, this time with more stubbornness. Self-taught at first, then two years of in-person lessons that gave me real foundations. After that, a long stretch of barely playing, picking the instrument up occasionally without really progressing, putting it back down. The kind of plateau you can sit on for years without quite noticing.
My son picked up a guitar at 6 after hearing me play, clumsily, Stairway to Heaven, or maybe Put Your Lights On, I genuinely can't remember. What I do remember is that he took to it immediately, and he's now in his second year of lessons with an ability to memorize shapes and patterns in a single session that still catches me off guard. He's probably the reason everything shifted: watching him progress that fast made me want to take my own practice seriously instead of letting it drift indefinitely. I started playing regularly again two years ago and got back into lessons in 2025, working through rock, blues, metal, some classical and fingerpicking depending on the season.
I've been writing code since childhood, back when building a website meant writing HTML by hand, and my career took me through major French companies in media, e-commerce, and international markets. When I'm faced with a problem, my natural instinct is to imagine the code that could solve it. The "Know Your Fretboard" page came from wanting to stop thinking about note names and start reacting to them. The tuner and the metronome because I wanted something precise and personalised without juggling another app. "Sing on Sight" to work on my ear. FretMind started as a personal toolbox for me and my son, turned into a kind of interactive game to motivate him to learn the fretboard, and at some point it made sense to share it.
Not a course, not a subscription, not a gamified streak tracker. Just browser-based tools that listen to your microphone, respect your privacy, and get out of the way. An account is only needed for a few things:
That's the only reason it exists: no tracking, no newsletter, no monetisation of your data.
Whether you're a beginner, coming back after a long break, or just curious to see what this does, I hope you find something useful here.