Beginner cheat tape on violin option

For the viola, violin, and cello I'm not sure how iReadMusic could possibly display even spacing (could be a bug) because I've only implement 2^(1/12) spacing for these instruments. Can you set the number of frets in the settings page to 12 or 20 and see if they still appear to be evenly spaced? One thing that might seem confusing is that if you only have a few frets selected (displayed on the screen) the real spacing vs even spacing is kind of subtile.

Let's take the real violin as an example. The standard violin has an open scale length of 12.8 inches (the string length from the nut to the bridge). The 12th fret is exactly half way between the nut and bridge or 6.4". Below is a table showing where the fret positions are located on your standard violin from the nut:

fret ------ from nut ------ fret-to-fret
1 -------- 0.718" -------- 0.718" (nut-1)
2 -------- 1.396" -------- 0.678" (1-2)
3 -------- 2.037" -------- 0.641" (2-3)
4 -------- 2.641" -------- 0.604" (3-4)
5 -------- 3.211" -------- 0.570" (4-5)
6 -------- 3.749" -------- 0.538" (5-6)
7 -------- 4.257" -------- 0.508" (6-7)
8 -------- 4.737" -------- 0.480" (7-8)
9 -------- 5.189" -------- 0.452" (8-9)
10 ------- 5.616" -------- 0.427" (9-10)
11 ------- 6.019" -------- 0.403" (10-11)
12 ------- 6.400" -------- 0.381" (11-12)

You can see that on a real instrument that the spacing between adjacent frets doesn't change much (less than a 1/16"). Now on iphone screen we have a little over 2.5" to display the fretboard. If we have 6 frets displayed (the default setting) and we translate the fret spacings to pixel locations from the end of the nut it'd look like this:

fret ------ from nut ------ fret-to-fret
1 -------- 80 ---------- 80 pixels (nut-1)
2 -------- 157 -------- 77 pixels (1-2)
3 -------- 229 -------- 72 pixels (2-3)
4 -------- 298 -------- 69 pixels (3-4)
5 -------- 362 -------- 64 pixels (4-5)
6 -------- 424 -------- 62 pixels (5-6)

So on the iPhone the "real spacing" with 6 frets there is only an 18 pixels difference from the first fret spacing to the 6th fret spacing. This is just over 1/16" (pretty small) on the iphone. The difference becomes more noticeable when there are more frets displayed.

Another way to look at how I've implemented spacing is if you had cheat markers on your violin and then took a picture of your fretboard and zoomed the picture to match the number of frets displayed what you see on your iphone screen in the photo app should match iReadMusic display.

The iPhone just doesn't provide a very good representation of a real violin, and claiming that I implement "real spacing" is probably a little misleading.

Anyway hopefully my explaination makes sense. If this is not what you are seeing please let me know (or email me at support@glpsoftware.com)

Bruce

When we added the fretless instruments (cello, viola, and violin) we knew not having markings on the fretboard was a little problematic.  I'll add an option to allow "cheat sheet" fret markers to be displayed in our next release.

I've seen some violin cheat markers at every fret, and others only at 1^st, high 2^nd, 3^rd, and 4^th fingers. Do you have a preference for the markers at every fret or just the 4 for the beginner mode?

Also, we currently space the frets evenly on the fretboard, instead of the 2^1/12 spacing of an actual instrument.  Trying to emulate a real fretboard on the small iphone screen is troublesome because the higher frets get too close together making it even harder to play.  Let me know if you think markers at even spacing will cause more confusion and we should only add them if we use the correct spacing.