Anybody that knows me will be aware that I always have an innate urge to tinker with things, and to learn whatever I can about whatever takes my interest at the time.  You’d also know that I’m involved in IT based stuff, and take guitar grade exams every year for no real reason other than ‘because I can’.

As part of those exams, you have to learn certain patterns (be it scales or arpeggios) in various keys, which the examiner will then ask you to reproduce at will.  This isn’t quite so hard as it sounds – it’s essentially just drilling the patterns to the extent where you can play them without thinking – but it’s fairly hard to test yourself at coming up with random sequences.

Previously I’ve written small C# winform-based applications to help with this, where it fires off a random sequence that you have to play back.  As I’m now trying to learn more WPF / Silverlight, I thought that this time I’d try implementing it with a shiny new UI.

As you can see, the UI has been kept fairly simple, influenced fairly heavy by the WP7 ‘metro’ interface (I should point out that the icons were designed by users on another site, which I’ll link to once I’ve remembered where I got them from!).

The function itself is relatively limited – essentially, there are three main groups of information dependent on the selected Grade.  These are:

• Single notes (useful for testing the knowledge of location of notes on a string / fret)
• Scales
• Arpeggios

Each grading includes scales and arpeggios from the prior grade, plus some additional items.  The user can select their grade option as follows:

The user can then select what section they want to be tested on (scales, arpeggios etc).  Once this has been selected, the system will then give them random notes, scales or arpeggios dependent on their options.  The user can also modify how frequently these appear, allowing them to practise slowly to begin with, then increase the speed as their memory improves.

As I’m by no means a particularly astute Silverlight developer, I’ll be adding further articles about how this project advances in the future, on the vague hope that somebody else might benefit from the array of cockups I’m quite liable to make.

In the meantime, feel free to comment or post any ideas as to additional features.