A FeedBack plugin that turns scales, arpeggios, technique, and grooves into practice routines you actually want to run — and plays them back in its own DAW-style player with a real-sounding backing band.
Most practice apps teach you songs. Virtuoso teaches you the skills — the gallop, the ii–V–I, the one-drop — so what you build here you take off the screen into your own playing. Pick a routine, set a tempo, hit Play, and drill.
Practice the skill, not the song. Virtuoso is a practice & learning tool, not a song/riff generator — generated routines exist to teach a move, then get out of your way.
Install drops it into FeedBack and it shows up in the nav as Virtuoso: pick a routine, hit Play, and you're drilling in under a minute.
The DAW-style shell — pick a routine, set a tempo, and drill on the 3D Note Highway (or Tab / Notation).
- No song to unlock — drill the exact thing you're stuck on. It generates the scale, arpeggio, or lick at any position, key, and tempo. No library, no waiting for the right tab.
- A backing band that doesn't sound like MIDI. Sampled comp, bass, and drums voiced to the chord — real feel to play to, not a metronome with chords.
- Skills that transfer. Every routine names the move it teaches, so you leave with vocabulary you own — not muscle memory for one song.
- DAW-grade control, no subscription. Loop, slow down, mix, retune — the controls a practising player actually wants. Rides your FeedBack install; no separate sign-up.
One DAW-style shell with four modes, all sharing the same player, ruler/transport, mixer, and render stage — no second window, nothing to relearn between modes:
- Ladder — curated, sequenced routines that build a skill from the ground up; the Skill Ladder picker groups them into bands from beginner foundations to advanced / idiom packs.
- Custom — full manual control: pick the exact scale, shape, position, meter, progression, and feel you want to drill. Any Custom setup can be saved as a preset or dropped into a Workout.
- Workout — a timed, multi-block practice session ("woodshed N minutes"): warm up, target a weak skill, then apply it — built from the same Ladder / Custom units, run back-to-back on a wall clock.
- Jam — pick a style, hit one button, and play along immediately over a looping backing band. Jam is a mirror, not a judge — no score, no rank; instead the live fretboard strip lights up the current chord's tones / guide tones so the jam teaches you what to reach for.
The two newest pillars — Workout (timed woodshedding) and Jam (play along while the fretboard strip lights up the tones to reach for — a mirror, not a judge).
For chord-scale practice, the line now moves through the changes musically instead of restarting on each chord — pick how much harmony you're navigating, beginner to bebop, on one dial:
- Park — stay in one scale, accent the chord tones as they pass.
- Connect — the scale follows the chord and your line voice-leads into each change's nearest guide tone (3rd/7th) rather than resetting to the root; common-tone pivots and half-step resolutions fall out naturally.
- Connect + approach tones — adds the classic bebop chromatic enclosure (a note above + a note below) leading into every change.
The Workout pillar got a much bigger library and two new corners of practice:
- 23 starter Workouts spanning goal × level × genre × instrument — guitar and bass — each a warm-up → technique → application arc you can run as-is or make your own.
- Strumming / comping — a new practice type: hold a real chord grip and drill the strum hand across folk / pop / funk / rock feels.
- Bass groove vocabulary — the root–5th–octave box, octave groove, the 16th-note dead-note pocket, slap & pop, and right-hand technique — sequenced groove-first, the way bass is actually learned.
- A Depth Ladder above the tempo climb — prove a skill in a new key (the Travel axis) — with an XP readout that's gained-only and never gates (Off / Casual / Hardcore).
The Ladder picker grew from a handful of routines into ~80, grouped into opt-in packs you add from the + Pack manager — so the list stays a curriculum map, not a wall to scroll. Three Core bands (Beginner → Intermediate → Advanced) are always on; everything else you switch in when you want it:
The + Pack manager — opt-in packs grouped by family (the Concepts ladders shown), each routine naming the skill it builds; the Core bands stay installed, and genre / bass packs slot in when you want them.
- 8 Concept ladders — one skill, sequenced easy → mastery: Triads, Arpeggios, Guide Tones, Fretboard Freedom, Expression, Rhythm, Picking, Legato. Each is a vertical climb through a single idea (Fretboard: one box → CAGED links → position shifts → 3NPS → whole-neck map) rather than another grab-bag.
- Deeper genre packs — Blues (box → shuffle → bends → call-and-response → mixing major/minor), Rock (power + backbeat → pentatonic → lead vocab → pedal riffs → ♭VII changes), Country (major pentatonic → cowboy changes → double-stops → chicken pickin' → pedal bends → train beat), alongside the existing Metal / djent pack and the community-seeded Fingerstyle pack (p-i-m-a + the spider trio) — a genre ladder is the application layer: take the grammar into a style's accent.
- A bass-native ladder — Bass Foundations on a 4-string, groove-first the way bass is actually learned: root–5th–octave → octave groove → dead-note pocket → walking bass → slap & pop. The picker is now instrument-aware — guitar-only shapes hide on bass, and the reverse.
- Own your time — the Rhythm ladder runs subdivisions → the 16th pocket → swing → displacement → odd meters → an "Over the Barline" metric-superimposition capstone, plus a herta burst drill in the Picking ladder. And Division now follows your meter — a quarter-note pick in 7/8 auto-bumps to the felt eighth pulse, with a caption that names the cross-pulse instead of letting it feel like a bug.
- Scoring fixed on current FeedBack — an internal audio conflict was silently disabling note detection. Fixed: the tuner, grading, and new per-note hit/miss gems on the 3D Highway light up as you play (mic on).
- The djent ladder — the Metal pack deepens from one advanced rung into a climb: Low Chug Lock → Accent the Grid → Chug & Stab (grouping cells) → Skip & Gallop → Moving Power-Chord Chug, topped by a trade-bars Lock the Cell jam capstone — plus "The Breathe" Workout (the clean ↔ heavy dynamic arc) and drop-A / 8-string floors on tap. The riff is the rhythm; every rung names the device honestly (a 3+3+2 cell is a grouping — true polymeter stays the summit).
- The Chords concept ladder — open cowboy grips → the five CAGED shapes → barre chords → comping whole progressions → 7th/9th colour grips.
- The Rhythm ladder grows — the gallop family (gallop / reverse / skip / snap) as one-note cells, accent displacement, the single-string pulse (tresillo and clave ride it), half/double-time, the reggae skank, and a Trade Bars make-your-own-groove capstone. The pure-time rungs adapt to bass automatically.
- The screen stays awake during playback — no more display sleep mid-drill.
- Chords score for real. With the note_detect plugin installed, a polyphonic verifier judges chords and double-stops — the project's first external contribution (thanks, byrongamatos). Without it, chords are honestly shown, not judged. Either way, the silent ~33% accuracy cap on chord drills is gone.
- Timing judging rebuilt to be fair. Per-note windows that mirror FeedBack's own grader, mic-latency compensation that self-calibrates to your setup, and a hit commits on one clean detection. Muted ghost notes aren't misses (the mute IS the technique), bends aren't judged at the unbent pitch, and what can't be fairly judged — too-fast bursts, slurred notes, pitches below the mic's floor — is disclosed and excluded, never counted against you.
- Strictness is a dial you own. Virtuoso now inherits the host tuner's timing sliders (Clean Timing / chord window) — loosen once in note_detect's settings and every drill follows. Pitch stays ±50 cents: the judge got correct, not lenient.
- See every hit. Hit paint on Tab, notation, the 2D highway, and the fretboard strip; the 3D Highway shows its native hit/miss marks with ±ms / ±¢ labels. The end-of-run card leads with the verdict, shows rung progress inline, explains how the run was judged in plain language, and keeps a standing "Best here" target with challenge CTAs ("Take it to 88 ▸").
The end-of-run card: verdict first, an honest judged count, your climb inline — and the dare to take it faster. Every exemption is named under "How this run was judged."
The biggest batch yet. The Workout pillar grew from "a timer over your drills" into a practice gym that measures and remembers; bass became a first-class path with a way to prove feel; and the judge got honest on a real DI rig.
The Workout remembers what you did — a gym, not a stopwatch:
- Per-block measurement — the end-of-Workout recap lists every block as a chapter (played ● / touched ○ / unreached —), gated so a DI-less or mic-less player is never shamed, with a quiet per-block seam verdict between blocks.
- A woodshed log — time on the instrument, this week, practice days, and a Woodshed level that climbs with the hours; "Your numbers" keeps the clean tempo to beat for each skill, and Travel counts the keys you've held it in.
- Save your routine — any Workout you build becomes a named, returnable object: "My morning warm-up" is yours to load next session. Plus length presets and a tempo-locked breath between blocks.
- A forgiving streak — survives a single rest day; two in a row ends it, and coming back is celebrated, not punished.
- Visible XP, levels & competency badges — earned for naming a skill ("It Travels", "Up to Speed"), never for rounds or rank — and the whole layer flips off with one switch if you'd rather just practise. Reward is a readout, not a trophy.
The practice-gym readout — woodshed level, your clean-tempo PBs, keys traveled, and competency badges — beside a copy-as-image share card (a state you reached, never a rank).
Bass got a pocket to prove — now a first-class, instrument-aware path:
- An instrument-aware bass Core parallel to the guitar Core, plus new bass ladders (foundations + a technique gym) and a sweep-picking ladder; the picker hides guitar-only shapes on bass and vice-versa, and your instrument/tuning persists.
- Felt-hold — bass feel can finally be cleared, not just practised. A qualitative pocket verdict — Locked / Settling / Dragging / Rushing — reads your timing spread and trend (no new DSP) and logs the tempo you held Locked. It's a word, not a leaderboard: "Locked the pocket" is a state, never a rank.
- Honest right-hand work — the 1-2-4 fretting doctrine and pinky-legato display, sequenced the way bass is actually learned, plus a corrected walking-bass approach.
Grading you can trust on a real rig — two judging P0s, both straight from dogfooding:
- Sustained / DI playing scores now. The grader mirrors the host's one-way level veto instead of demanding a fresh attack on every note — a compressed DI or a held note stops getting silently rejected after the first hit.
- A Workout plays once and ends. Notes stopped reading as "hits" when you weren't playing and the counter stopped freezing mid-session — a Workout now runs once, ends, and shows the recap.
Share what you cleared — copy your scorecard as an image, on every lane (Ladder, Custom, Workout, Jam), to drop into Discord or a text. Cooperative and honest: it shows the skill and the state you reached, never a score to beat.
And some polish — the Setup/Play pill became a tidy « collapse icon that widens the stage (and now scales cleanly across window sizes), the inspector panels slide instead of snapping, and a fretboard-render regression is fixed.
The guide track became a real guitar through a real rig, the first community-contributed pack landed, and the most-requested djent figure got built right:
- A real guitar guide voice, through an amp. The line you play along to is now a sampled electric guitar (DI) by default — and the Mixer's Guide and Rhythm strips grew an Amp row: Clean / Overdrive / Metal, three designed amp+cab presets that work across every exercise, Workout and Jam. Auto puts the DI through the Clean amp so it always sounds like an instrument, not a beep; pick Metal and your djent drills finally sound like djent. (Acoustic styles keep their steel-string, and bass keeps its bass.)
- The Fingerstyle pack — the first Acoustic & Fingerstyle band, seeded by a beta tester's own teacher-handed warmup: name the picking hand (p-i-m-a Foundation, broken chords over open grips with honest per-note finger letters), then the three spider rungs — a two-string crossing drill where every note swaps strings and everything rings, graded adjacent strings → a skip → full width ("if you like pain"). Straight from the Discord thread to the Ladder — switch it on from the
+Pack manager (it's an opt-in pack, like the genre ladders). - The Herta Chug. The relentless modern-djent figure — a sixteenth, two thirty-seconds, a sixteenth, repeated with no gap so the accent walks across the beat (a 3-over-2) — verified against the drum-transcription literature, with the Push tier at the figure's canonical tempo. The drummers call the cell a herta; now the Metal ladder teaches it on guitar, strict alternate, palm-muted, honest.
- A kinder first rung. Real-beginner feedback round two: the Chromatic Warmup now enters at quarter notes (one clean note per click — a bar is exactly one string), the count-in's subdivision ticks became opt-in, and the sixteenth-note version moved to the Picking band as its own Chromatic Sixteenths rung. Bonus: this hunt uncovered and fixed a long-silent bug that had pinned the warmup's up-the-neck variations to one spot.
- A cleanly-licensed backing band. Every bundled instrument sample — melodic voices and drums — now comes from one clearly-MIT soundfont, with a provenance README in the repo. And the plugin ships a proper thumbnail + description for the host's upcoming pedalboard Plugins page.
- Jam is a mirror, not a judge — play along over a live backing band while the fretboard strip lights up the chord/guide tones to reach for. No score, no rank — a sandbox to apply what you drilled, not a track to mimic
- A real backing band — sampled comp, bass, and drums (kits change by feel & genre), through a safety-limited master so nothing clips or jumps in level
- Drum kits that change by feel & genre — procedural 808 / 909 for electronic feels and sampled acoustic kits for everything else, on grooves that follow the meter — including odd meters (7/8, 5/4, …) via a grouping-aware groove
- Nearly 100 curated Ladder routines — three always-on Core bands (Beginner → Advanced) plus opt-in Concept ladders (Chords, Triads, Arpeggios, Guide Tones, Fretboard, Expression, Rhythm, Picking, Legato), genre packs (Blues, Rock, Country, Metal with a full djent climb), and a bass-native ladder — every one naming the move it teaches
- A live Mixer (
M) — swap the comp to organ, the drums to a 909, dim the backing, all while you play - Four render surfaces — 3D Note Highway, 2D Highway, paper-style Tab, and staff Notation — one chart, your choice, with Light/Dark themes
- Extended-range & drop tunings — 6/7/8-string guitar and 4/5/6-string bass, standard / drop / open / fully custom per-string
- The practice-room basics — count-in, A/B looping, share links (and copy-as-image scorecards), saved presets & tunings, on-screen hotkeys (
M/P/[/?), and a calm practice-gym readout (woodshed log + Woodshed levels, your clean-tempo PBs, and competency badges — gained-only, switch-off-able, never a gate)
| Renderer | What it looks like |
|---|---|
| 3D Note Highway | FeedBack's bundled 3D fretboard view (the default for guitar and bass), loaded on demand and inheriting the host's highway look settings |
| 2D Highway | Borrowed "Jumping Tab" view — string-coloured note tiles, sustain bars, accent halos, technique glyphs, beat lines, measure numbers, chord tiles, section markers |
| Tab | Paper-style guitar tab — parchment ground, fret numbers on the strings, italic chord names, red playhead; dark mode swaps to a navy ground |
| Notation | Standard staff notation (treble / 8va / bass clef), key signature, beams, accidentals — same parchment-and-ink design language; dark mode available |
One chart, your choice of surface: paper-style Tab and standard Notation (3D Highway shown above).
A docked live fretboard strip sits under the Tab and Notation views (toggleable), drawing the exercise's whole shape and glowing the notes as they sound. The Light/Dark toggle appears when Tab or Notation is active and persists across reloads.
Playback is fully contained in the plugin (its own clock, Web Audio graph, and pitch tracker). The signal path is per-track buses → a master safety limiter → output, so stacked notes stay clean and normalised — no clipping, no surprise full-volume hits.
The live Mixer (M) — balance or mute the practice voice, bass, comp, drums and click, swap instruments, pick an amp (Clean / Overdrive / Metal) for the guide and rhythm guitars, or dim the backing, all while you play.
- Practice voice — sampled, at the actual string/fret pitches; the oscillator voice is the fallback so you're never left silent on a cold load
- Backing band — sampled comp + bass voiced per progression step (key-aware voicing engine), plus the new drum voice
- Drums — a
drumsbus with its own compressor (before the master); kits are chosen per style/feel and pieces are humanised so it doesn't read as a drum machine. Drums stay silent through the count-in and enter on the downbeat - Metronome — accent on beat 1, group accents that follow the meter's grouping (3+2+2 vs 2+2+3 for 7/8, etc.)
- Per-style sound — an audio-profile system maps a genre to a tone/brightness, overridable from the Mixer
Dial in anything — 12 keys, 25+ scales, any tuning, any meter, any feel — or let a Ladder routine set it all for you. The full menus:
12 keys; 25+ scale families: major, natural / harmonic / melodic minor, the seven modes of major, the melodic-minor modes (Dorian ♭2, Lydian augmented, Lydian dominant, Mixolydian ♭6, Locrian ♮2, altered), minor & major pentatonic, blues, bebop major & dominant, whole-tone, diminished, Phrygian dominant, plus exotic colours (double harmonic, Hungarian minor, Neapolitan minor) for the metal/idiom work.
- Guitar — 6 / 7 / 8 strings: Standard, Drop D, Eb / D Standard, DADGAD, Open G/D, Drop A (7), Drop E (8)
- Bass — 4 / 5 / 6 strings: Standard, Drop D, Eb, BEAD, high-C tenor, Drop A. Bass uses a single movable position box (CAGED/3NPS are guitar artifacts and are hidden on bass — by design)
- Custom tuning — per-string note inputs (
E2,F#3,Bb4…); + Save tuning… persists it under a name in the host DB - Piano — UI scaffolded; keyboard generators are a future phase
30–260 BPM · 4/4, 3/4, 6/8, 7/8 (2+2+3 or 3+2+2), 5/4 · quarter / eighth / sixteenth / triplet subdivisions · straight / swing / shuffle feel · count-in None / 1 / 2 / 4 bars.
Scale patterns · chord-scales (mode-of-the-moment or chord-tone emphasis) · diatonic arpeggios · progression arpeggios · sweep arpeggios (HOPO turnaround) · chromatic warmups · guide tones · and a deep technique/vocabulary library (legato, bends, vibrato, scale in 3rds/6ths, call-and-response, tremolo, tapping, pedal point, string skipping, position shifts, rhythmic displacement, chromatic enclosures, bebop scale, arpeggio inversions, walking bass, hybrid picking, triadic pairs, pentatonic superimposition, shell voicings, octave displacement, the metal pedal-riff / gallop / herta-chug / twin-lead primitives, strumming / comping, the fingerstyle set — p-i-m-a broken chords + the two-string spider, and the bass groove set — root–5th–octave, octave groove, dead-note pocket, slap & pop, right-hand technique).
CAGED position (auto fret-window per key + shape) · CAGED single-shape (strict-ascend or closest-position) · 3-notes-per-string (seven modal positions) · open position · manual position box · single-string run · full-neck map. Shapes are degree-driven with a no-unison guarantee — a run never sounds the same pitch twice across strings.
Diatonic progressions, the common pop/jazz/blues sets, minor ii–V–i, 12-bar & quick-change blues, and a jazz harmony engine: chord depth (power / triad / seventh / 9·11·13 / 6 / m6 / 6-9 / sus / m(maj7)), auto-diatonic stacking with correct altered tensions, tritone substitution, and a voicing engine that turns a full interval stack into a playable, musical voicing rather than stacking every formula note.
- Save preset — full config to the host SQLite DB (
virtuoso_presets) - Save tuning — custom tunings to
virtuoso_tunings, shown under "Saved" every session - Share link — the whole form state encodes into a URL hash; paste a link to land on the exact same exercise
Upgrading FeedBack Desktop? Some Desktop upgrades advise deleting the config folder. Your presets & tunings live in the host DB and survive (and can be Settings → Exported/Imported), but your Skill-Ladder progress, installed packs, mixer and preferences live in browser localStorage and are cleared by a config wipe. Export your settings first if you want to keep them. (Ladder progress isn't yet in the export — on the roadmap.)
- A working FeedBack install (web/Docker or Desktop)
- Write access to FeedBack's
plugins/directory
cd /path/to/feedback/plugins
git clone https://github.com/got-feedback/feedBack-plugin-virtuoso.git virtuoso
docker compose restartClone into the Desktop app's configured plugins directory (visible in Settings → Plugins).
Note: Don't clone into a protected/admin install path (e.g. anything under
C:\Program Files\…) — Windows write-protects it. Use the user-writable plugins directory the Desktop app reports in Settings.
After restart, Virtuoso appears in the plugin navigation.
Open Virtuoso → Ladder, pick a beginner node (e.g. Pentatonic Foundation), and hit Play — you're drilling. Then switch to Jam: pick a style, press play, and noodle over the band while the fretboard strip shows you the notes to land on. That's the whole loop — drill a skill, then go use it.
| File | Purpose |
|---|---|
plugin.json |
FeedBack plugin manifest |
screen.html |
Plugin UI (markup + inline styles + bootstrap) |
screen.js |
Generators, pathways, renderers, audio engine, mixer, and host integration |
routes.py |
DB-backed preset + tuning persistence; self-hosted audio asset routes |
settings.html |
Plugin settings / info panel |
static/ |
Self-hosted audio assets (wafonts/ sampler + drum kits) served by routes.py |
docs/ |
Architecture, exercise schema, pedagogy, theory knowledge base, and design notes |
- Structured multi-week Programs — a guided arc of Workouts toward a named goal (the practice-gym layer that measures and remembers is in; the multi-session container is next)
- Deeper drum realism (per-genre grooves + humanisation) and a brush/percussion kit set
- Per-instrument Skill Ladder content (guitar Core + Concept/genre packs, and an instrument-aware bass Core with a felt-hold pocket verdict, shipped; piano to follow)
- Live amp-modelled distorted backing (host NAM-engine borrow, in progress)
- Piano / keyboard exercise generation
Copyright (C) 2026 Christian Cowan.
Virtuoso is free software, licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0-only): you may use, study, modify, and share it — and anything you build on it (including running it as a service) must stay open under the same terms.