Fingerings attached to notes but drag with beams

• Nov 15, 2020 - 20:07

Fingerings in the attached score are attached to notes but follow beam repositioning.

Interestingly this does not always happen but I have not yet investigated further.

Fingerings attached to notes but drag with beams.mscz


Comments

Proabbly you should be using the guitar fingerings instead of the piano fingers. Then you wouldn't need to be repositioning everything. Piano fingerings are positioned relative to the to top of the chord, which is why it responds to changes. Guitar fingerings are positioned relative to the notehead.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Ah. I'm new and still poking around.

I guess I was glibly uncurious about the second set of fingers 1, 2, 3, 4 (not sure what the 5 means, thumb?)

Initially when I saw the Piano fingering I hovered and the tooltip showed "Fingering" so I thought this was a "guitar palette" as the other options are for guitar right hand, string indications, and lute tab symbols, and that these fingerings would be legitimate and behave well in a guitar score.

In contrast to the ambiguous Piano fingering tooltips I now see that Guitar fingering tooltips politely say "LH Guitar Fingering." Had I only noticed earlier, I would have wouldn't have needed to hand place each fingering.

Yes, I should have read the Handbook. But given the following citation I doubt I'd have realized that Guitar and Piano fingerings have different properties (and since one went unmentioned I now wonder if there are others yet unknown to me):

• Keyboard music employs the numbers 1–5 to represent fingers of the left or right hand. There is also afingering [sic] positioner   plugin to help you optimize the layout of piano or keyboard fingerings.

• Guitar music uses the numbers 0–4 to represent left-hand fingering (T is occasionally used for the thumb). Right- hand fingering is indicated by the letters p, i, m, a, c. Circled numbers represent instrument strings.

That said, via the Inspector I see that:

• a guitar fingering is born with a x property of -50, right aligned, and y = 0
• a piano fingering is born with an x property of 0, center aligned, and y = 0

But by default Guitar and Piano fingerings appear in very different y positions relative to the staff ... so it seems they're positioned relative to the parent note? No mention of this in the handbook.

And the Inspector displays no settable property for observing or governing a fingering's default y position relative to its parent note; it's unclear what other objects it may be instructed to hurdle.

Indeed I can move fingering vertically by changing the y setting in the Inspector, yes, but to my fascination that doesn't explain the initial default positioning on instantiation, or why the Piano fingers generally follow beam positions.

Thanks for bringing the two fingering options (Piano and Guitar) to my attention!

scorster

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

> Piano fingerings are positioned relative to the to top of the chord

Indeed, piano fingers are often positioned relative to the top of the chord. But if the chord is beamed—and the beam appears above the chord tones—on dragging the beam the fingering(s) follow the beam. Guitar fingering just stay put regardless of beam location or orientation.

I don't see these points mentioned in the Handbook.

Off hand do you know if there are other properties—with regard to piano vs. guitar fingers—that would be important for a scorist to be aware of?

scorster

In reply to by scorster

They should obey standard engraving practice, but that's actually a lot of subtle and complex special cases involving single notes versus chords, multiple voices versus single voices, stem directions, presence of beams, and more. We don't generally list every detail of every rule followed by the layout algorithm in the Handbook as that would get tiresome quickly. We just try to produce good layout by default, and then if you have need to deviate from the defaults, we document how.

Similarly, we don't document every detail about how we calculate the spacing between notes, or how we calculate the minimum width for a measure, etc. These are complex details that the user should not normally need to be concerned with, and in any event are subject to change. We simply try to do our best by default and clearly document how to override the defaults.

Piano fingerings display above the full chord. So if you extend the stem in such a way that this would then interfere with the default position of the fingering, then yes, this changes the default finger position to avoid the lengthened stem, exactly as one would need when writing actual piano fingerings. Guitar fingerings are not placed relative to the stem so they normally aren't affected.

So, I would say, there is nothing specific you need to be aware of, except that piano and guitar fingering obey different rules, and if you use the proper type, things basically just work well out of the box. And if you then need to adjust further for whatever reason, you can.

Thanks to Marc I'm now aware that, in certain ways, Guitar and Piano fingers have some distinct properties and behaviors.

For one, the inspector shows

• Fingering>Style>Fingering for piano fingerings (like the tooltip)
• Fingering>Style>LH Guitar Fingering for guitar fingerings (like the tooltip)

So I think, I'll select all the fingerings and swicht the Style to LH Guitar Fingering:

• I could us the S button, but that option is not always present, and indeed its' not present for the Fingering properties! (Request)

• And unfortunately the Selection Filter isn't making sense to me this evening. I uncheck All, and check Fingering, but no fingerings highlight. I've used the Selection Filter before, but I'm bumbling with it tonight. It appears that it only filters objects in and out of an existing selection, which can easily be lost. So reselect a few bars and make sure voice 1 and voice 2 are checked. Bingo, all fingering are highlighted BUT so are all the notes and stems and beams. (Request for added check boxes for notes, steam and beam?)

Back to really, I'm looking for an option to select all fingerings, as if I had Ctrl/Cmd clicked each. Then I could select Fingering>Style>LH Guitar Fingering to correct the error of my ways.

That said, I'd like to suggest a nice UI selection option found in Adobe Illustrator palettes. How about an Illustrator-style meatball icon, perhaps located to the right of the Reset Style Default button and the Style button? Pressing the meatball icon selects all all similar objects in the score, and optionally all similar with same properties. Then with one-stop Inspector shopping, right where I need to go to change the Piano fingerings to Guitar fingerings, I could select all the Piano fingers without traveling to some sort of selection filter that can go and get specified objects only.

Ha ha! And after all this someone's going to reply, "Just use the Select Similar Object tool."

Thanks as always!

scorster

In reply to by scorster

"S" is present for properties that are controlled by a style setting. If you don't see an "S" button, it's because it isn't controlled by a style. There cannot be a style setting to control which text style is used for fingering, that would break the ability to have different types of fingerings in the same score (no LH & RH fingerings for guitar at once).

The Selection Filter only applies to range selections - by definition, a selection of all notes and resets from a given start to a given end position. It's a way to exclude certain element types from that range selection. it is not a way to build a list selection of just fingerings. Instead, the Select menu provides that. Not sure what a "meatball menu" is, but as you've noted, we already provide the standard right-click context menu.

In reply to by scorster

> Scorster wrote: Ha ha! And after all this someone's going to reply, "Just use the Select Similar Object tool."

Sure enough, I found a selection solution via right click. And an easy way to convert all piano fingerings to guitar fingerings

Right click a Fingering object (a piano fingering)
Right click and choose Select>More…
Check same Subtype (which shows Fingering)
Close the dialog and MuseScore highlights all piano fingerings in the score

Then, in the in the inspector, I can change all Fingering subtypes (i.e. piano) to LH Guitar Fingering

scorster

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