When you practice the fretboard, taking your hand off the guitar to press a key every time you check an answer breaks the flow. Fret Drill can listen to your guitar through an audio interface and take answers from muted "tick" strums. This guide covers how to set it up and what to check when detection isn't working well.
What you need
- An audio interface: anything that gets your guitar into the computer. The USB audio feature of a multi-effects unit works too.
- Chrome or Edge: a Chromium-based desktop browser is recommended.
- Microphone permission: browsers treat audio interface inputs as a "microphone." Click Allow the first time you connect.
Your guitar signal is analyzed only for changes in volume, inside your browser. It's never recorded or sent anywhere.
How answering works
There are only three actions on the question screen.
- Play a note: fret the spot you think is the answer and play it. Ringing notes aren't treated as answers; the moment you play is recorded as your response time.
- One mute: show the answer. After the answer appears, it means "Right."
- Two quick mutes: on the question screen, "I don't know"; after the answer appears, "Wrong."
Muting is detected most reliably when you lightly cover the strings with your fretting hand and pick. You're looking for a short "tick" that stops right away without ringing.
Setup steps
- In Settings → Input, choose Guitar and open Guitar input setup.
- Click Connect input and choose your audio interface. If you're not sure which channel your guitar is on, leave it on Auto.
- Go through the four Calibration steps in order. They measure the levels of your guitar and gear, so you only need to do this once.
- Noise check: hold the strings and don't play anything for 3 seconds.
- 5 mutes: one "tick" at a time, 1 second apart.
- 3 ringing notes: let notes ring the way you do in practice.
- 3 double mutes: three "tick-tick" pairs, as if entering a wrong answer.
- In Try it, check that one mute shows O, two show X, and ringing notes get no reaction at all.
When detection isn't working
Most problems come from gear settings that stretch the sound out or raise the noise.
- Turn off delay and reverb. Time-based effects stretch a short mute out, making it hard to tell apart from a ringing note. If you run through an effects unit, use a clean patch.
- Lower the gain. High gain on a drive or amp sim raises the noise floor and makes mutes longer.
- Single-coil hum: if it's loud, switch pickups or move a little away from monitors, lights and other electronics.
- Interface input level: set it generously, but low enough that the clip light doesn't come on when you play hard.
Recalibrate after changing any settings. The result screen shows the gap between mutes and ringing notes in dB; the bigger the gap, the more reliable detection is. If it still doesn't match, use Adjust thresholds to nudge the mute threshold and the double-mute window. If a double mute is being split into two single mutes, lengthen the double-mute window.
No audio interface?
You can do the same practice from the keyboard. Space shows the answer, → is right and ← is wrong. With a Bluetooth page turner that sends arrow keys (a sheet music pedal), you can answer with your feet.
Once you've settled on an input, keep it going a little every day with the 10-minute daily routine.