Five boxes. Seven modes. Too many shapes.
Octopus is a guitar neck where every note shows its interval over the root: 1, b3, 5, b7. No CAGED shapes and no positions to learn by heart. You build scales, arpeggios and chords from the intervals, anywhere on the neck, and you always know which note you are on.
How it reads
Colour shows the job a note does in the chord, not its pitch. After a week you read the neck by colour: chord tones solid and loud, tensions outlined and quiet.
Six of my arms are guitar strings. Not one of them memorises boxes.
String sets
Keep only two or three strings and follow a chord along the whole neck. On a pair you see how the 3 and the 7 move from one string to the next; on three strings you start hearing triads. The arrows slide the set one string at a time.
Open this in the app →
Zones, not boxes
Pick a four or five fret area, or several, and play through them on a diagonal. Every run starts and ends on the root. The neck shows the note that is sounding, the ones already played and their order, at any tempo, with real guitar samples, a click and a drone.
Open this in the app →
Practice
Four exercises turn reading into knowing. Each one names the musical fact when you get it wrong, so you learn the interval, not the dot.
I don't do shapes. I do intervals.
On the phone
On a phone held upright Octopus shows a five fret window with big notes to tap, and follows the playback along the neck. Turn it sideways and you get the whole fretboard. Left-handed players get a mirrored neck with one switch.
Share a link and the other person opens exactly your neck: key, scale or chord, zones and strings. Useful for teachers.
