On the presentation of fingering
A coworker installed MuseScore in order to make a piece they got from their piano teacher legible and wrote me (because they found my name listed as maintainer), and today they proudly shared their first notated piece, and I was surprised.
I saw something resembling this:
I thought “wtf, that’s not fingering, that’s figured bass?” Well, no…
… figured bass looks different.
But what kind of way to notate fingering is that? If I…
- disable Autoplace
- set X offset to -0.5 sp
- reduce font size by 1 pt
… I get the fingering I expected to see:
Now I’m nowhere near a keyboarding instrument expert, but that’s what I recall from when I was 14 and had a few lessons before puberty made me stop them.
Maybe I should consult Gould, but… there seems to be a story behind this?
Comments
To my knowledge both are used and "valid".
During my organ days I've indeed mostly seen the out-of-staff notation used as fingering (but usually on top of the staff, to have it not confused with figured bass). Although when we annotated manually we often used in-staff fingering.
In this case it could be "solved" by changing from the generic "fingering" text style to the "guitar left handed" fingering text style.
In reply to To my knowledge both are… by jeetee
OK, thanks to the both of you. So we have three (in the stave, always on top, on top/on bottom) valid possibilities. I guess I just never encountered the others yet, but, as I said, my keyboarding skills are minimal.
The MuseScore default for piano as shown is pretty standard, but indeed, it's also quite subjective. Gould says to keep numeral clear of the staff unless absolutely necessary, and this is indeed the most common convention in my experience as a professional pianist. We use a rule that says to stack chords above the treble staff, below the bass clef staff. The position you changed it to - on-staff, next to notehead - is used in mutli-voice music primarily, and again, we do this by default so manual adjustments aren't normally necessary.
If you prefer that style as a general principle, consider adding the fingering as LH guitar fingering as mentioned, which is normally laid out that way.
If you do decide to adjust manually, BTW, no need to disable autoplace, and in fact it is counterproductive if you do. By leaving it enabled, MuseScore will open up space as needed between notes.
In reply to The MuseScopre default for… by Marc Sabatella
I had to disable autoplace to get the number into the “correct” position in the first place.
But switching to… why is it called “LH guitar fingering”?… will do the same as disabling autoplace and moving X by -0.5 sp, so that’s what I’d do in the future, should I need it again. (I guess I’d also have to consider font choices, both family/face and size.)
But my curiosity regarding this is sated, it’s not something that I see happen in my scores in the near future.
In reply to I had to disable autoplace… by mirabilos
You don't need to disable autoplace to move the fingering - all the usual methods (drag, Inspector, cursor nudge) all work just fine without disabling it. Better, because as I said, without autoplace you will get collisions with other notes (not in this case because there is nothing close by, but in general, you definitely will. Lots of them.
The style of showing fingering immediately next to the noteheads is commonly used for left hand in guitar music, so that's why it is called LH Guitar Fingering. It does not do the same as disabling autoplace and moving by 0.5 sp. For one thing, as mentioned, disabling autoplace is counterproductive here and results in collisions; using LH Guitar Fingering gives you that positioning and avoids collisions. But also, the LH Guitar Fingering algorithm takes multiple voices into account automatically as well as other variables like presence of beams. Not that you can't manually adjust for those cases too, but it won't always be the same amount or in the same direction.
The one thing disabling autoplace is doing for you here is resetting the default position to directly on top of the notehead, but a much better ay of doing that is to assign a custom text style. Then you can use your own styles for 0.5 sp to the left, another for 0.5 sp to the right, etc, and assign them yourself based on the context. But again, so much easier to use LH guitar finger, which does all that automatically. Assuming, of course, you still wish to deviate from standard placement above/below the staff.
In reply to You don't need to disable… by Marc Sabatella
Yes, I saw that when I inspected what the “LH Guitar Fingering” did in the style settings.