Norvela Music support

Getting started

Norvela Music is a practice tool for fiddle and violin players. It listens to what you play and helps you tune it, time it, read it and keep track of it.

The first time you open a screen that listens, iOS asks permission to use the microphone. Say yes — the tuner, the trainers, the reading follower and capture all need it. Nothing is recorded; see the privacy policy for what happens to the audio.

Play in a reasonably quiet room. The pitch detector is good, but it hears whatever is loudest, and a television across the room will win.

Tuner

Play an open string. The tuner names the note, shows how many cents sharp or flat you are, and settles as you get closer.

Reference pitch — A440 by default. Change it if you are playing with an instrument tuned elsewhere; baroque pitch and older pianos are the usual reasons.
Cross-tunings — AEAE, GDGD, DDAD and standard GDAE are all available. Pick the tuning first and the tuner will expect those strings.
Bow steadily. A tuner reads a sustained note far better than a plucked one, because it needs several cycles of the same pitch to be sure.

Metronome and drone

The metronome does what you expect, with one thing worth knowing: you can put the click on the backbeat, on 2 and 4. That is where an old-time or swing player actually feels the pulse, and practicing against a click on 1 and 3 teaches the wrong thing.

The drone holds a steady reference pitch to play against. It is deliberately a single voice with no chorus or detuning: the beating you hear between the drone and your string is the information, and a second detuned voice would drown it in beating of its own.

Reading and playing along

Open a piece from the library and play it. The app follows what you play against what is written, keeps the staff scrolled to where you are, and shows you afterwards which bars gave you trouble.

The library ships with the exercises — scales, arpeggios, string crossings, a second-finger drill and a shuffle-rhythm study. Tunes are being added as each one is sourced from a documented public-domain edition and checked against it; the app only lists music it can actually open, so an empty section is an honest one rather than a broken one. In the meantime, the way to read your own repertoire is to capture it — see below.

You can transpose any piece before you play it. The app rewrites the notation into the new key rather than just shifting the pitches, so what you read is spelled correctly.

Capturing a tune

Play a tune to the click and the app writes it down. This is how anything that is not in the library gets in — including your own tunes, and anything still under copyright that we could never ship ourselves.

It works best if you play cleanly and in time, one note at a time, at a tempo you are comfortable at rather than the tempo the tune wants. Double stops and chords are not transcribed; the app writes a single melodic line.

Note trainer and ear training

Note trainer shows a note on the staff and asks you to play it. It is sight-reading drill, and it is scored so you can see whether you are getting faster.

Ear training plays two notes and asks you to name the interval. Start with the common five and move to all twelve when they stop being hard. Press Play as often as you like — hearing it again is the exercise, not cheating.

Set lists

A set list is your running order for a night: the tunes, the keys, the tempos and who sings them, so the drone and the metronome are already right before the count-in.

New set list — the + button in the top corner. It asks for a name straight away.
Add a tune — the ⋯ menu inside a set list. Only the title is required; the key sets the drone and the tuner for that tune.
Reorder or delete — tap Edit, then drag or swipe.
Rename — the ⋯ menu inside the list, or swipe on the list in the index.
Transpose one tune — tap its key. Useful when a singer wants it up a step, and it does not require the tune to have notation.

Set lists live only on your device and are never bundled with the app or sent anywhere.

Practice log

Sessions over a minute are logged automatically when you read a piece: how long, which piece, what tempo, how accurately.

There is deliberately no streak and no badge. A streak turns one bad week into a reason to stop, and a badge rewards opening an app rather than playing an instrument. The log shows what you did.

Accessibility

Every text size in the app is a semantic style, so it scales the whole way to the largest accessibility sizes without clipping. Controls meet the 44-point minimum target, VoiceOver labels are written rather than inferred, and the app respects Reduce Motion and Increase Contrast.

If something is unreadable or unreachable at your settings, that is a bug we want to hear about — please write to us with your text size and which screen.

Troubleshooting

The tuner shows nothing

Check the microphone permission in Settings → Norvela Music. If another app is using the microphone — a call, a voice memo, another music app — iOS may not hand it over. Close the other app and return.

The tuner jumps around

Usually background noise, or a very quiet note. Bow a sustained note at a normal volume in a quieter room. Very high notes and harmonics are genuinely harder to track than open strings.

There is no sound from the metronome or drone

Check the volume. The metronome and drone deliberately play through the silent switch — a metronome that goes quiet because of a switch you forgot is worse than one that does not.

The tuner's in-tune chime is very quiet

It plays while the microphone is in measurement mode, which switches off the system's audio processing so the pitch detector gets a clean signal. That costs loudness on the speaker and there is no way to have both at once. The phone also taps when a string lands, which nothing can mute.

The notes run off the screen while I am playing

This was a real bug in an early build and is fixed. If you still see it, tell us the piece, the orientation and your text size — those three things together reproduce it.

A set list says it has tunes but they will not open

Tap the list itself rather than the count. If a tune has no Read button, it has no notation — that is expected for anything not in the library, and the key, tempo and running order still work.

I want to start over

Deleting the app removes everything it stored. There is no account to close and no copy anywhere else.

What the app does not do

Stated plainly, so nothing here is a surprise:

No sync and no cloud. Your practice log lives on one device. Moving to a new phone does not carry it across except through an iCloud device backup.
No chord diagrams. The live trainers follow one note at a time. Chords appear in two places and both say what they are: a captured tune gets chords suggested from its melody and key; a recording you ask the app to read gets chords heard by ear, marked rough when the app is unsure.
Tab is written under a captured tune and under the top line of a recording, for the instrument set in Settings. The sight-reading trainer stays on the staff on purpose.
Recording keeps audio only when you press record on the Recordings screen, and it stays on your device. Asking the app to listen to a recording — for the key, the tempo, the chords and the melody — happens on the phone too, and what it finds is a suggestion, not a fact.
No account and no social features. Sharing is the system share sheet: a recording as an audio file, or its notes as MIDI, to wherever you send them.
The library is small on purpose. Everything in it is sourced from a documented public-domain edition and checked. We would rather ship a short library we can stand behind than a long one we cannot.

Contact and bug reports

support@norvela.app. A real person reads it.

For a bug, the four things that make it fixable:

Device model and iOS version
Which screen, and what you were doing
What you expected, and what happened instead
Whether it happens every time

Norvela Music — Support