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Fat Tones vs Gitori: Which Fretboard Trainer Should You Use?
Guitar

Fat Tones vs Gitori: Which Fretboard Trainer Should You Use?

By Udit M.·

The short answer: Fat Tones is a friendly, gamified iOS app that turns note-finding into drag-and-drop puzzles and an arcade shooter — a good fit if flashcard-style drilling bores you. Gitori is a free, browser-first trainer that also gamifies note names, then keeps going into scale degrees, triads, chords, and arpeggios.

What Fat Tones does well

Fat Tones leans hard into "practice should feel like a game, not a chore":

  • Assemble the Fretboard, a drag-and-drop game where you place notes onto the neck, with filters for naturals only, sharps/flats, single strings, or just the 12th fret and up.
  • Note Blaster, an arcade-style mode where you play the called-out notes on your real guitar to "blast" obstacles — genuinely playful compared to a standard quiz format.
  • Live guitar detection. The "find the notes" activity listens through your mic and tracks your speed as you improve.
  • Pentatonic Scale assembly, a drag-and-drop drill for building major and minor pentatonic shapes on the neck.
  • Practice-anywhere mode for drilling fretboard recall without a guitar in hand.

For a beginner who wants low-pressure, game-first practice, Fat Tones delivers.

Where Gitori differs

Fat Tones is squarely a note-and-pentatonic tool. Gitori treats that as the starting line:

  • A curriculum, not a set of mini-games. Gitori sequences fretboard notes → scale degrees → triads and inversions → seventh chords → arpeggios → modes and the circle of fifths, for guitar, bass, and keyboard.
  • Any device, not just iOS. Gitori runs in any browser (plus mobile apps) — practice on a laptop, Chromebook, or phone, no App Store required.
  • Live guitar detection and spaced review, so the notes you miss keep resurfacing until they stick — the same active-recall principle Fat Tones' guitar-listening drill uses, applied across a much longer curriculum.
  • Free to start, with the theory behind every course explained in plain English on this blog.

Where Fat Tones has an edge: its arcade-style presentation and drag-and-drop puzzles are a genuinely different, lighter feel than a standard quiz, which can matter for keeping younger or easily-bored beginners engaged.

Which one should you pick?

Choose Fat Tones if you're an iOS-only beginner who wants the lightest, most game-like introduction to fretboard notes and basic pentatonic shapes, and don't mind stopping there.

Choose Gitori if you want a free tool that works on any device and keeps teaching once you know the notes — into degrees, triads, chords, and arpeggios.

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