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Your violin companion.
Violin,
made easy.
Ever wanted to learn the violin and got put off by sheet music notation? For most people, that steep learning curve makes learning a favorite song feel daunting.
Violinista puts the song on the fingerboard instead, a bit like guitar tabs. Every note appears where your hand goes, in time with the music.
Free forever, no card. A song is already loaded so you can see it working before finding one of your own.
How it actually works
Drop the song in
Open a MIDI or MusicXML file. Violinista scores the tracks and picks out the melody line for you.
Watch the neck
Every note lights up where your finger goes, labelled with the string, finger number and position, in time with the music.
Slow it down and drill it
Loop the hard bars, lower the tempo until they are clean, and bring the speed back up.
And no, you have not cheated
Reading music is worth learning eventually, and nothing here stops you. The staff scrolls right beside the fingerboard, so while you are watching your hand you are also seeing what that note looks like written down. Most people pick it up by association, which is far less painful than drilling flashcards for six months before you are allowed to play anything you like. The point is that you get to start today, with the song that made you want a violin in the first place.
Fingerboard note view
Load a piece to see each note on the fingerboard with its string, finger, and position. The display follows playback.
A/B loop
Mark a section, slow it down, and repeat it until it is steady.
Graded scales
Play into your microphone to see the error in cents for each note. Choose expressive, pure, or equal intonation.
It does not stop being useful in a month
The same engine, pointed at a different problem depending on who is holding the violin.
Just starting
You can’t yet hear a fifteen-cent error. Nobody can at first, because that is a skill and not a talent. Cap the fingerings at first position and any song you load comes back playable with the hand you already have. The note you are aiming for is drawn on the neck, the drone tells you when you have found it, and the tuner tells you by how much you missed.
- Fingerings capped to first position
- Reference drone on every string
- Notation scrolling beside the neck
- No account, no card, no expiry
Past the beginning
Your problem is no longer finding the note. It is the four bars that fall apart at tempo and the shift you land differently every time. Mark the passage, drop the speed, bring it back up. Then run the scale of the piece into your microphone and find out whether your third finger is honestly where you think it is.
- A/B loop at any tempo
- Scales graded note by note in cents
- Fingerings chosen across the whole phrase
- A heatmap of where your hand goes wrong
Already playing well
Equal temperament is the tuning of a piano, not of an unaccompanied violin. A soloist plays leading tones high and pulls the line toward the tonic and the ringing open strings. Grade yourself in expressive or pure intonation and the trainer stops calling your best playing sharp. Arpeggios, broken thirds and sevenths are here too, along with viola, cello, the Danse Macabre scordatura and AEAE cross tuning.
- Pythagorean, just and equal temperament
- Arpeggios, broken thirds, dim7, whole tone
- Scordatura and cross tunings
- Intonation trends over months
Teaching
The lesson is an hour. The week is the rest of it. Show a passage on the neck instead of drawing it on a napkin, scan the etude you are setting so the student can see it fingered, and set the position cap to match where they actually are. Then have them bring the record: the heatmap says which finger on which string, and the export gives you the whole week rather than the version they remember.
- Scan a printed page into the studio
- Position and shifting limits per student
- A heatmap that names the weak finger
- CSV and JSON export, free on every plan
Built on the actual physics of the instrument
A tab is only as good as the fingering behind it. If the app puts your hand in the wrong place, it is worse than useless, so the parts a violinist would notice first are the parts that got the most work.
Fingerings a player would actually use
The whole phrase is scored at once: hand shape, shift distance weighted by tempo, string crossings, awkward repeated fingers. The cheapest path through all of it wins. That is why a passage that fits in third position stays in third position instead of shifting on every note.
Positions numbered the way players number them
Position names follow scale degrees up the open string, so 3rd position puts the first finger on C from the G string. Not on some semitone count that happens to look right in first position and falls apart above it.
A tuner that does not lie on the E string
Bright E-string tones are where ordinary pitch detection jumps an octave and tells a beginner they are catastrophically flat. This uses the McLeod method, which is built specifically to resist that, and only moves the needle on frames it trusts.
Playback that stays with the picture
Notes are scheduled ahead against the audio clock rather than fired from an animation frame, so what you hear and what you see on the neck stay locked together even when the machine is busy.
Every file, not just the tidy ones
Running status, SMPTE timing, overlapping repeated notes, missing note-offs, names declared after the first note. All of it handled, with a warning where something is odd rather than a silently wrong answer. That free MIDI you found will open.
Your playing stays on your machine
Pitch detection runs in the page, and the microphone audio is never uploaded. The only thing that leaves your machine is the numbers it produces, which note and how many cents off, and only when you finish a scale.
Pick a song and start
The fingerboard, tuner, notation, metronome, loop practice, score import and the fingering settings need no sign-up, do not expire and are not metered. Premium adds the graded scales and the record of how you are actually improving, which is only worth paying for once you have a few weeks behind you anyway.