Practice you can move through

The old Arpèges only went forward. It dealt a card, you found the shape, you hit Next, and that card was gone — one patch of neck at a time, one direction. That's a fine way to test recall and a bad way to build a fretboard, because playing isn't a one-way street. You walk a shape up the neck. You go back to fix the note you rushed. v7 finally lets you do both: slide the fret window up the neck a fret at a time, and swipe back to the card you just earned.

The neck is one strip, not five boxes

You learned the neck as shapes: the box at the 5th fret, the next one at the 7th, the CAGED positions stacked up the strings. Each one is playable on its own, and the gap between them is where solos stall — you can move inside a box and freeze the moment a line wants to leave it. The notes you need are right there, one fret over, in a shape you also know. You just never practised the seam.

Sliding the fret window is the drill for that seam. Take an Amin7 arpeggio at frets 5–8, then slide the window one fret: 6–9, 7–10, 8–11. The shape's span holds; only its place on the neck moves. Do it slowly and you feel the thing the boxes hide — the top note of one position is the bottom note of the next, so the five islands were always touching. Slide far enough and the box you started in and the box three frets up stop being two things you memorised and become one map you can walk.

The window slides the whole length of the neck, frets 0 to 22, and it clamps at the ends so a four-fret shape never runs off the edge. Drag the fretboard, or use the two steppers under it, or — on the web, with the neck focused — the arrow keys. Same one-fret step whichever you reach for.

Don't lose the rep you just nailed

There's a specific small win in this kind of drill: the card comes up, you hunt for a beat, and then your hand lands on the shape. I used to mash Next the instant that happened — and spend the next minute trying to remember what I'd just gotten right. The rep you just nailed is the one that hasn't set yet. It's the worst one to throw away.

So v7 keeps them. Every card you draw goes onto a trail, and you can swipe right (or tap Previous) to walk back through it and sit with the one you rushed past. Fresh draws only happen at the newest card, so going back to study an earlier one never burns a new prompt or breaks your streak — the trail is a rear-view mirror, not a second deck. A pill tells you how far back you are; tap it and you're returned to the latest card, ready to draw again.

The move that pays off most: when you fumble a card, let the next one come, then swipe back and take the fumbled one again, cold. That second attempt — after the shape has left your short-term memory — is the one that actually teaches.

Both gestures are the same refusal

Slide the neck, swipe the trail — on the surface they're two different controls. Underneath they're one idea. A one-way drill trains a single skill: reacting to whatever's next. Everything else you do on the instrument needs the other direction — carrying a shape to a new position, going back to clean up the phrase you flubbed. v7's two gestures are that second direction, applied to the two axes practice actually moves along: where you are on the neck, and where you are in the session. The app used to only go forward. Now it doesn't, and that's the whole change.

If you've been drilling Arpèges one card and one box at a time, open it again and move. Slide a shape up the neck; swipe back to the one you just got right.