If I said that you could have access to as many scales, chords and intervals as you could reasonably need, without having to be able to read music, might you be interested? Well, that's exactly what C-Thru Music's Notetracker, one of the most intuitive little gizmos currently on the market, has to offer.

The Notetracker is rather like an oversized slide-rule (remember them?), in that it consists of a plastic laminated sleeve which houses a mobile plastic strip. The strip has a multitude of musical note names printed on it, and the sleeve is covered in punched holes and arcane legends, such as 'Harmonic Minor', 'Country Blues', 'Minor Triad' and so on. When sliding around inside the sleeve, the notes on the strip show up through the holes; on one side of the sleeve, these holes make up scales and modes, and on the other the holes show chords and intervals. Any key can be handled simply by sliding the cardboard strip inside the sleeve, which changes the root and steps of each scale or chord. On the scale side, an exhaustive selection of scales and modes is furnished, from the simple major scale, through all the modes to wholetone, jazz minor, blue's and Hungarian minor. Similarly, on the chord side, everything from a major triad up to dominant 13ths and minor 7th/sharpened 5th is provided; a simple interval chart clearly names every interval from a minor second up to a major 13th. That's a total of 18 intervals, 28 chords and 23 scale types.

That's not all; the strip itself provides a reference of the cycle of fifths and fourths, and chords for each step of the major scale are shown on the main strip.

Also included with the Notetracker is a handy book that both explains how to use the device and presents some basic musical ideas, without teaching you theory. The booklet also includes a couple of 'instrument maps' for finding notes and starting points for right and left hand guitar, right and left handed bass (four or five string!) and violin, as well as a keyboard map. If you're musically literate, you won't need to learn how to read, and if you're not, then the Notetracker will be helpful, since it doesn't presuppose fluent reading abilities, providing instead a new way of approaching the nuts and bolts of music.

The Notetracker is a very clever and useful device, for readers and non-readers alike, since everything (bar fingering diagrams) is available in one compact unit. Those with a musical background will also find it useful, since it's a ready reference for chords and scales of all kinds, and is very educational to boot. It's like the musical equivalent of a reference book that you pick up to search for one bit of info, but end up getting side-tracked down a load of different alleys — try out one scale, and you'll try it in another key, then you'll see a relationship to another scale shape somewhere else. All the scales and harmonic possibilities are available at a glance. Whether you play by ear or off the printed page, the Notetracker should manage to help, entertain or inspire you.

Further Information
Notetracker £12.95 including VAT and p&p.

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