Recorder Fingering Hints in Score

• Jun 19, 2022 - 19:11

I thought I would share a quick-and-dirty way I have found of easily showing alternate recorder fingerings and trills in my scores. Here is an example.
FingerExample.png
By my own convention, I put an asterisk above the note I want to indicate using staff text, I then add a second staff text element on the same note, bumping up the font size to 14pt and framing it with a rectangle using the Inspector. The finger holes are annotated by repurposing five characters under Master Pallet > Symbols > Wind Techniques as shown. I separate the thumb, LH, and RH holes with a "space" character.
PalletSymbols.png
I put the five symbols in a custom pallet. When editing I copy and paste an existing chart and tweak its holes by clicking in the new pallet. I get what looks like an image without fussing with managing a bunch of images.

What I am still missing is a non-ambiguous way of showing trilling on half-holed fingers such as low G-Fsharp on an alto.

Attachment Size
FingerExample.png 3.96 KB
PalletSymbols.png 22.01 KB

Comments

In reply to by yonah_ag

Thanks for pointing out your plug-in project. That looks very nice. To be clear, I am not proposing any specific new alternate fingerings. So, I am not sure I have anything I can contribute to your project per your request. In any case, although some alternate fingerings are pretty standard, others vary from instrument to instrument and have to be arrived at by experimentation. Some notes have a bunch of alternate fingerings that can be used depending on the context.

It looks like your plug-in will take the notes in the score (or measure) and tell the player how to finger them. This would be great for a teacher to annotate a student's score with helpful reminders of standard fingerings. In my case, I need different functionality. I am the one finding or choosing an alternate fingering, either to simplify a passage, trill or turn, or to alter tonality. I simply need a fast way to stick it in the score as a reminder of my choice. My tip is really geared at this use-case. By the way, I also prefer my fingering hints to be oriented horizontally so they can be placed in a score without expanding the space between staves. However, that choice would not work for your plug-in as it is more geared at notating a whole series notes.

Rather than a font of where each character represents a full realized fingering, what I would like to find is a font whose characters show what individual holes can look like. It would be a pretty small font with a dozen or so characters. I would specifically like a better picture of a thumb half-hole, double-holes, partially shaded or leaked holes, and trilled holes. I have not found this yet, and do not yet know how to create one. Instead of hacking something together with "embouchure" glyphs as I did, I would have strung together recorder-specific "hole glyphs", still in a staff text block.

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