Notation for Piano fingering is quite limitated and uncomfortable!!

• Aug 13, 2020 - 09:23

Hi Musescore developers! (and also hi to other Muesescore users who have encountered the same problematic)

I started writing fingerings on my piano compositions (using the F9 menu) and noticed how limitated the notation is.

For instance, if I want to indicate a finger change on one note I can't put that little curved line that connects the two numbers (I'll leave an example below of what I mean).
Another problem that came up to me is chord fingering. When I want to finger a chord, I'd expect that the numbers are displayed in a vertical way, but instead they are all placed in the same spot (and thus I have to manually drag them one at a time to the correct position).
I'd also appreciate there be an option to write multiple fingerings for one same passage (maybe there's another way of doing this?)

Thanks for reading, I hope you can fix this problem because Musescore is awesome!

Attachment Size
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Comments

For the curved line, you might be able fake it by entering a slur on the note, turning off "automatic placement," and adjusting the placement yourself. As for the vertical display of the fingerings, what version of MuseScore are you using? They automatically stack on top of each other for me (or did you mean vertical next to the notes of the chord, as shown in the picture?). I think most everything to do with fingerings could be manually adjusted to your liking, but yes, I definitely would love to see some extended automatic functionality.
(Also, you might want to look into changing the workspace in MuseScore so that you don't have to open the F9 menu every time you want to add fingerings. I believe the "advanced" workspace shows the "fingerings" tab in the palletes on the left.)
Hope this helps!

In reply to by David McCaulley

Hi, thanks for the comments.
About the vertical fingerings, I'm still struggling with the Musescore fingerings in general, but I'll figure it out (no, I didn't mean fingerings next to the note).
As for the F9 menu, it's not a problem, I just open F9 and one of the etiquettes is "fingering" (I know I can move the etiquettes up and down).
I'll try that slur thing but it seems so messy...

Normally fingerings for piano are written above the staff, and that's the default in MuseScore, but if you prefer some particular fingerings to be written to the left of the note, just use the guitar fingering instead.

Not sure what you mean about them all being displayed in the same place, though, that shouldn't be inless you are using an ancient version of MuseScore. With any modern version of MsueScore, simply press Space after typing the fingering for the top note of the chord and it automatically moves on to the next note where you can type that, etc, and they all stacked perfectly.

The finger change indication is a symbol available form the Special Characters palette - press F2 or use the icon at the far left of the text toolbar while editing to get to it. You can then drag that symbol to your own palette for easier reuse in the future.

If you continue to have problems, please attach an actual score so we can understand better what might be going wrong.

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