Ponticello
New in 1.8 · Redesigned for iPhone Duo
Ponticello puts your own fingerboard tapes on the screen, lets you read the music as tab, score or a falling highway, and slows it, loops it and arranges it down to where you are. No account, no scoreboard, and nothing leaves your phone.
The new mark
Ponticello is Italian for “little bridge”, and that is the mark: a cello bridge seen from the player’s side — the arched crown, the waist, the feet and the heart — with the four strings resting on it in the colour of the note each one sounds open. C green, G red, D blue, A yellow: the same colours the fingerboard, the chart and the play screen use for the same strings.
Everything a practice session needs
Three ways to read
Finger numbers on four string lines, engraved bass-clef notation with fingerings, or a highway of notes falling towards the hit line in four string-coloured lanes. The fingerboard beside it lights the note you are playing, on your tapes.
Make it your practice
Every song comes in four levels, from held bass notes a beginner can reach to the full melody. Pick the bars to loop, slow the tempo, choose which part of the original to play, and start from a Liquid Glass bar that stays under your thumb.
Tuner
The tuner uses the same analysis as the play screen, built for the cello’s low register — so it never confuses a low C for the C an octave up. It is a tab of its own now, and the microphone runs only while you are on it.
Your practice
How long the music really ran, per day — totals, streaks and six months at a glance. No upload and no score out of ten: twenty minutes played badly is twenty minutes practised.
Chords, worked out for the cello
Chord atlas
Pick a tonic and a scale and see every chord in it — triads, sevenths and extensions — drawn on the cello’s fingerboard in your tape colours, with roots as squares. Where no comfortable grip exists, Ponticello says so and gives you the arpeggio instead.
Chord charts and progressions
Read a song as chord names or as cello shapes, rolling along at your tempo with the next fingering previewed. Or build your own progression from a preset or from nothing, and play it back.
Ponticello 1.8
The whole interface was rebuilt on the phone it now lives on — and it still runs on Android and the web.
The tab rail, the back button, the play transport and the tuner over the score are system glass. The music itself sits on plain cards.
SF Pro for text and SF Pro Rounded for numbers, at native sizes — a design unit is never smaller than a point any more.
Library, Practice, Tuner and Chords are one tap away from anywhere, in the Duo’s own side rail.
Indigo for actions and selection, so “selected” never looks like the blue of a D string. Every colour pair is tested for contrast.
Tabs and themes
The tab rail on the Duo’s edge is the system’s own. The theme button beside the title cycles Light, Dark and Neon — and the tab bar, the glass and the status bar follow the theme you picked, not the phone’s.
And the rest of the kit
Promises
Free and open source
Ponticello is built with Expo and React Native, with a pure-TypeScript core — the fingering solver, the MIDI arranger, the pitch detector and the chord catalogue — covered by over a thousand tests. Build your own library from your own MIDI files, fix a fingering, or add a feature.
git clone https://github.com/GMBermeo/ponticello
cd ponticello
npm install
npm run ios # iPhone Duo simulator
npm run web # or try it in the browser
npm run build:library:free
npm test