He has studied percussion but skipped it after the diploma examination. He also studied graphic and industrial design and works now for 20 years as a (graphic) designer. He knows what he is saying although he would never describes him as a musician any more. But he was the ideal graphic designer for a book about music theory.
But: I wrote »no musician« on purpose to signal that it is an outside view. Even if it is a very experienced view from the outside. But it has been shown a little: if you are not inside, you cannot judge that. I am not always sure about that …
Bumping this back up as it already contains a lot of useful info. I’ve been using my same basic text font for all musical elements for 10 years or so, and I figured it’s time to move on to something else. (I usually use a different font for all page-attached elements like titles, composer, folios, etc.) As this is for use with Dorico, here are some requirements:
It’s a serif font. I’d be willing to explore other options if someone has good examples of it in use, but probably unlikely to change my mind.
It has to default to lining figures. Even if they are contained in the font, there’s no way to tell Dorico to use the lining figures if a font defaults to old style figures, and I need a font that can be used for chord symbols.
It has to have at least the 4 main styles: regular, italic, bold, and bold italic as I use them all. Further options (semi-condensed, caption, etc) are a plus but not a necessity.
Non-horrible kerning of 11 and 13 is a plus too. There’s no way to make a global change to these in chord symbols, and it’s a PITA to edit them.
Cost isn’t a huge issue, but I have an Adobe CS subscription free through the university, so anything from Adobe Type is fine. Obviously Google Fonts are fine too. I have a 20 year old Adobe Font Folio 9, and I’ve picked up or purchased a few randomly over the years too. Some expense is fine, but I’m not dropping $1K on a typeface collection.
So … here are a few contenders that I already have installed or have access to. I tried to more or less equalize the sizing. A few of these I’ve already ruled out as I’ve used them in the past, are too common, etc, but I put in for comparison. I would imagine at least three of these will be instantly recognizable to most people with enough interest to click this thread, LOL.
Any likes/dislikes? Anyone have a current favorite text font for music that’s particularly obscure? Any publishers currently using anything more interesting than the style guides cited above? Just curious if anyone has a grasp on any current type trends for music.
For Lyrics, I’d say that a semi-condensed and/or Caption font is often essential. You want something that slightly compressed horizontally, while having the legibility for its size of a Caption metric.
#1 of course is Minion. Great font, but I used it for about 10 years in the late 90s to mid 2000s so it’s just there for reference. I still have 20 year old Finale files that don’t open correctly because I used now defunct “multiple master” instances of Minion in them. (TGTools Font Info, then Data Check/Font Utilities to fix it)
I’ll post all the names in a bit if anyone wants to know, but I really like #4 too. Downside is that it is just the 4 styles plus some heavy and block styles I don’t have and am not interested in, so no semi-condensed, caption, etc. The regular 3 has a flat top instead of curved so I haven’t decided if I like that or not for chord symbols. Obviously the italic 3 is curved as posted in the example, so fine for triplets.
All the candidates posted have a reasonably large x-height, I guess I should have mentioned that in the requirements, so should be fairly legible at music sizes. #4 is from a more obscure foundry so would be a bit more unique as well.
I don’t do a ton of lyric work, mostly lead sheet or soloist with a large ensemble, but I agree. It’s certainly more desirable to have these variations as options.
There were a few others that default to OSF that I removed as well. It would be cool if D5 had some more typographical features that would allow for use of lining figures if they were contained in the font.
What I think is that any font that looks like Times Roman might fit te need for Title, Plain Text, Lyrics and so on, even I’m more into Futura fonts style. I mostly use Futura for my jazz scores mixed with handwritten styles. But talking about classical music, I think one may use non-serif fonts for modern looking along with Serif fonts. I’m not an expert, but I think one might break the rules In general, it’s an art, when it looks beautiful, it’s just beautiful!
In general, it’s an art, when it looks beautiful, it’s just beautiful!