Learn to Shred with a DIY Guitar Trainer

I am sort of a ridiculously visual person. Tell me something complex, show it to me in abstract, and I’ll struggle to understand it until steam shoots out of my neck bolts. Show it to me as literally as possible and I’ll never forget it. Learning guitar as a teen, I found guitar chord charts to be really helpful. But I bet if I learned via one of these LED-equipped chord displays and I bet I’d be twice as likely to remember the chords and chord progressions.

This device was created by Mushfiq Mahmud. He 3D printed a guitar neck, used an Arduino for the controller, and an LED matrix to indicate the finger placement along the frets. His Instructable provides all of the details, the 3D print files, and the Arduino code.

I’ve been thinking about taking up guitar again. The first thing I’d want to do is build one of these babies. If I do, I’m going to mount the neck horizontally for an even more literal display.