A friend sent me a button to the Chord House site, and I've found it great fun and a good learning tool. # Here's the homepage:

http://www.looknohands.com/chordhouse/

Now, it's set up for guitar and piano, but with just a litte messing about it can show great stuff for four-course instruments as well.

I was originally directed to the 'advanced guitar' page, so that's what I use. #
There is a picture of a fretted neck, and dots appear in the scale or chord configurations.

You can choose among sets of tuning presets for the fretboard picture, but what I did was to define a user string set for GDAD, with the two edge strings (in my case the top, both visually and tonally) just set to D, then I can choose chords and scales from the tables below the fretboard.

For stuff I want to work with more, I set up the chord or scale, then I took a screen shot of each chord or scale, opened the screen shots in PhotoShop and cut out the two extra D courses, and there it is, the four-course pic!

And, yeah, I've used it to make scale drills for DADGAD guitar, too.

At the bottom of the page is a list of updates made to the system, with new scales and such added from time to time. If enough of us ask, maybe we can get a mando-neck page added as well...

I hope it's useful for y'all, too.

All the best,

stv