Puzzle Description:

Alto clef!

#1: Bill Eisenmann (Bullet) on May 23, 2022 [SPOILER]

Silly me kept trying to draw a viola!

Which made it harder than it should have been ...

Still not really sure what it's supposed to be, even after the puzzle description. Is the alto clef a part of the viola? Or some particular fingering pattern or something? I don't know enough about violas to know much about then. About the closest I've gotten to anything to do with violas was learning violin for one year in grade 8 music class, but I don't even know what the difference is between a violin and a viola.

As a trombone player I had to learn the alto cleff. I was never really comfortable with it.

Alan, there's really no difference between the violin and the viola. The viola just looks bigger because the violinists heads are bigger.
That's a joke. The viola is a little bigger and plays lower so it has a different clef. The treble clef is too high for all the viola notes and the bass clef is too low, so they have an alto clef that's in between, so all the viola notes are on the same lines of music. I hope that makes sense.

It's my instrument :-)
It's the clef that we use to read music (fits perfectly between treble and bass)
I may be biased, but I think it's a wonderful instrument, though it's harder to project than violin. It's mellower and usually softer.

I played an eighth size cello, in 2nd and 3rd grade, so it really wasn't much larger than a viola. :)

Excellent puzzle! Loved the solve....well thought out! Thanks!

My sister plays the strings and I play the woodwinds. I wondered if the trombone used the alto clef. Seems like the baritone would too? or maybe not, if it's not a C instrument?

The color logic was really interesting here! There's an odd sort of symmetry the way I solved it. I hadn't seen it before. Maybe someone has something simpler, but I had fun with my own solve. I hope this is coherent.

I was able to work on column 10. C11 has black squares at R9-11 and then you get contradictions if C10R10 is a dot.

Note if you try to place a black square above it without any red square between, you get a contradiction, so there must be a red above it and below it. But now there is a black/red/red/black either below or above r9-r11. Either way, we run out of squares where to place the first black. So R10 is not a dot. But we have a similar argument if C10R10 is red. The black/red/red/black must be either above or below it. Either way, the black is at least 2 squares away, leaving no room for the red/red/black.

So C10B10 is black. That fills in C9R10 and C10R9/11 as red. But then the two remaining black squares only fit in R2 and R19. So line/color logic solves the rest.

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