Idea/Request for Guitar Fingering

Dear Devs,

Thanks for the fantastic update in 1.2!

I wonder that if for when guitar fingering is implemented you may consider allowing the popover to automatically move to the next note in a voice once enter has been pressed? Dorico might assume that - like with chords - the composer or copyist has entered and will remain in fingering mode for some time.

Perhaps a keystroke that automatically selects a chord once the fingering popover is enabled may be good too, and then the fingering entered either ascends or descends through the chord?

Just some ideas. I can’t wait to see what you come up with for the guitar… The Noblest of The Instruments. Saving the best 'til last?

In another thread I proposed an intermediate thing for fingering just for the left hand along the lines of non-fretted stringed instruments. For electric guitar, this would make me already very happy indeed!

Cheers,
Benji

I guess they must be planning special features for the pipe organ then! :smiley:

I wonder that if for when guitar fingering is implemented you may consider allowing the popover to automatically move to the next note in a voice once enter has been pressed?

I feel like I’m going to be explaining why the fingering popover doesn’t advance with Space or the arrow keys forever now. :slight_smile: Please allow me to quote (again) my blog post from earlier this week:

It’s worth dwelling for a moment on why you cannot advance the popover with (say) Space or the arrow keys. Simply put, the fingering that you specify is an intrinsic part of the note itself, and as such you have to select the note or chord before you open the popover, so that Dorico knows exactly where that fingering should go. If you could advance the popover with the keyboard, Dorico would have to guess which note or notes should be selected, and this would introduce its own complexities, particularly in keyboard music.

Dear Daniel,

the problem is that you and your team have spoiled us, we now do not want to believe any complexity like this can prevent you from creating a great workflow to accomplish this complicated task… But thanks anyway !

Dear Daniel,

Thank you for taking the time to read and answer my post, especially as it appears that you feel that you are having to repeat yourself. I apologise if you thought (or verbalised) “here we go again…” For what it is worth, I was already aware that Dorico considers each fingering to be part of the actual note.

Keep in mind that the following is for guitar composers and for guitar music. I imagine that like me, guitarists do not use a midi keyboard for note entry, rather they use a mouse or the qwerty keyboard and write predominately in voices, entering chords when necessary. Having said that, I can’t see how this would not also speed up the workflow for fingering every single-voiced instrument:

What I don’t really understand is why Dorico must have the popover exited, a note manually selected and then the popover re-instantiated, so that it can recognise that the next note in the same voice is the one that it should be applying the fingering to.

If when the Enter key is pressed, Dorico signed off on the fingering for the current note with the command line then saying: “move to next note in current voice”, and the next note becoming automatically highlighted and thus selected it would save two key strokes in the workflow of the user.

To expand on this, in a bar of 4/4 with semi quavers, a user may have to place 16 finger numbers for the melody alone. In the current method that is 64 keystrokes (or 80 if you consider the modifier combo of shift + f as two strokes). If Dorico would select the next note in the same voice automatically, you reduce that number of keystrokes to 34 for the same bar. If the next note in that voice does note require a fingering number then the enter key signs it off as not needing one and then moves on.

Sorry if I am oversimplifying things and thanks again for your time.

You make a good point, and we will certainly think about how we can streamline the process of entering fingerings on every single note in the future. Perhaps guitar music is different from keyboard music, inasmuch as you typically do not indicate fingering on every single note in keyboard music (though I would be surprised to learn that it is common to have fingerings on every single note in guitar music, as that’s certainly not borne out by the music I have seen over the years – of course, I am not myself a guitarist so I have not seen as much music for guitar as I’m sure you have).

Thanks Daniel,

You actually may see fingerings on (almost) every note of a guitar score, and they do vary greatly from edition to edition. Certainly, if a theme is stated and fingered and later repeated it is rare to see the following instances fingered at all. With many early or original scores for the guitar as a six stringed single course instrument from the 18th Century, say from Giuliani or Sor etc, there may be little to no fingering.

You see more and more fingering instances when the music is transcribed from piano or other instruments, like much of the repertoire from the Spanish Romantic Composers (Albeniz, Granados, de Falla etc), editions of Renaissance and Baroque lute music have many and quite varied fingering options, or editions of existing music that have been fingered or edited by guitarists from more modern times, at least since Segovia.

The real problem that we are faced by (and that I am sure that you guys are aware of) is that many pitches exist on multiple strings. Many times, a position marker i.e. VII for the seventh fret/position may imply a sensible fingering choice and therefor be enough but it is not as clear cut as that. The open first string (E4) can and is also played at the 5th fret 2nd string, 9th fret 3rd string or 14th fret 4th string (it would be unlikely to be played at the 19th fret 5th string on classical guitar but is certainly an option for the electric). Fingering decisions can be made for musical reasons but many times they are simply functional and ease of playing decisions.

As you are also aware, we use a combination of left hand, right hand, string, position, barré and length of barré (eg hinge barré or barré to 4th string, whether the barré is indicated with a ‘B’ or a ‘C’), lines and brackets (I am sure there are more…) to notate our fingerings so when all put together it can be rather laborious. Having mentioned the first string E, it would not be uncommon for a passage in the 7th position to have that E4 note (or other open string pitches) played as an open string. We therefor need ‘0’ as a fingering option. I have already used 0 in Dorico…

Regardless of what happens, I can’t wait to see what you provide for the guitar. I love Dorico so far and like many have been watching and waiting over the past few years.

Just for fun, I have attached photos of the first two pages of Franz Burkhart’s Passacaglia, edited by Karl Scheit (Universal Edition 1949). This particular score is only six pages and the piece is approximately 8 minutes long. There are fingering indications on almost every single note! lol

Thanks again for your time.

Regards,
Warwick


Thanks very much for taking the time to put finger to keyboard on this topic, Warwick. We will definitely commit time to guitar features just as soon as we can – it may not be in the very next version, but if it isn’t, it would be among our highest priorities for the following one.

Loving Dorico so far and can’t wait to see what you come up with!

Thanks Daniel and team :slight_smile:

Regards,
Warwick