Update (6/25/2014): Find the lat­est ver­sion of my fin­ger­ing charts here: https://davidawells.com/resources/fingering-charts/

A cou­ple of weeks ago, I start­ed teach­ing a high school vio­list who decid­ed that she’d like to play the bas­soon. Not know­ing if she’d got­ten her hands on a fin­ger­ing chart or not, I decid­ed to take one to her les­son. I have quite a few charts lying around, but as I looked through them, I real­ized that I did­n’t com­plete­ly agree with any of them, at least not for use by a begin­ning stu­dent. I end­ed up tak­ing her a copy of a chart that I’d got­ten from the Conn-Selmer web site, but only after I’d marked it all up with a pen. It turned out that she did have a fin­ger­ing chart already, but I did­n’t com­plete­ly agree with it, either. As I was dri­ving home from her first les­son, I thought to myself how sil­ly it is to give a stu­dent a fin­ger­ing chart that I’ve marked all over, espe­cial­ly since this cer­tain­ly isn’t the first time I’ve done so. I resolved then and there that I’d make my own fin­ger­ing chart.

Awhile ago, I’d come across the very cool and well-thought-out Fin­ger­ing Dia­gram Builder built by Bret Pimentel, mul­ti­ple-wood­winds teacher at Delta State Uni­ver­si­ty. (You can read more about the FDB here). But until now, I had­n’t done any more than just play around with it. I used Bret’s FDB to crank out an image for each of my basic fin­ger­ings. I includ­ed my most com­mon alter­nate fin­ger­ings, but did­n’t get into slur, mut­ed, trill, or oth­er vari­a­tions.

Once I had all of the images, I had to decide how best to lay them out with­in a score. I’ve been using Finale for years, but I’d recent­ly start­ed play­ing around with Lily­Pond. Lily­Pond is an open-source music engrav­ing pro­gram that pro­duces very nice-look­ing scores — far clos­er in appear­ance to good old-fash­ioned hand engrav­ing than Finale’s often jagged and weird­ly-spaced out­put. The down­side (if you choose to see it that way) is that Lily­Pond has no graph­i­cal user inter­face; it gen­er­ates scores from spe­cial­ly for­mat­ted text files, and is in that way more like a pro­gram­ming lan­guage than a tra­di­tion­al nota­tion pro­gram. But, I’d been look­ing for a project to under­take with Lily­Pond, and this seemed like just the thing.

It took awhile to get the hang of Lily­Pond, and some for­mat­ting things I only ever got by tri­al and error. But, I final­ly end­ed up with two ver­sions of my per­son­al fin­ger­ing chart. The first is the one I’ll hand stu­dents. It cov­ers the more-or-less stan­dard range of the bas­soon (Bb1 — E5), uses only bass and tenor clefs, and includes a dia­gram with key names. The sec­ond, which I’ve dubbed my “Pro” chart, dis­cards the key dia­gram and switch­es to tre­ble clef at the top end. Oh, it also goes up to Bb5 (although I don’t yet have a reli­able fin­ger­ing for A5 — any­body?).

Since Bret has made the dia­grams gen­er­at­ed by his FDB avail­able under a Cre­ative Com­mons Attri­bu­tion-Non­Com­mer­cial-Share­Alike 3.0 Unport­ed (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) license, I’ve done the same with my charts. Please, take a look and let me know what you think. Is there any­thing I could do to make them eas­i­er to read, eas­i­er to use, or just plain look nicer? Or do you spot any fin­ger­ings that I’ve ren­dered incor­rect­ly?