Everybody's gone?

A. It's the weekend.

B. The folks kind enough to answer your posts have their own lives outside of SM.

C. You need to read the help documents and try some things for yourself rather than relying on being spoonfed every little technique.

Now, back to your problem: as far as duplicating the sizes exactly. If you go to edit > duplicate > option box...you can input numbers in the scale, translate, and rotate boxes. This way when you make your 60 duplicates, you can specify the distance between the strings and scale them slightly as each duplicate is made. Scaling it along a path....not sure if you can do that. I believe there are advanced workarounds using some of the animation tools. Personally, I would just duplicate each string so that they're equidistant from one another, then simply scale each manually.

That being said, I'm wondering, and maybe one of the other guys can chime in, if it might be possible to model the string area as a planar shape, assign a blinn shader to it, then create a "string" texture in photoshop (along with a string alpha to plug into the shader's transparency node) so that only the strings themselves show up while making the spaces between transparent.