or @MazzaClarinet/woodwind for a variety of woodwind players who aren’t necessarily doublers
I haven’t been able to find a great oboe list. Let me know if you start one (looking at you, @pattyoboe).
Twitter lists, if you’re unfamiliar, are put together by individual Twitter users, and are a good way to keep track of a group without cluttering up your personal Twitter timeline.
Being a doctoral student in multiple woodwinds performance, I like to keep an eye on the job listings for university faculty positions that involve teaching multiple woodwind instruments. There usually aren’t many, at least not many that involve a national search. But two positions were posted to HigherEdJobs.com this morning: Read More “University woodwinds job postings, 5/30/08”
Half-holes on the Fingering Diagram Builder aren’t a new feature, but I get lots of questions about how to do them, so here are some instructions I can refer people to.
Easiest way
If you’re making diagrams for flute, (French) clarinet, (German) bassoon, or recorder, and you don’t need anything especially complicated, you can open the “Keywork details” menu and click the option to turn “Half-holes” to “Upper,” “Lower,” or “Off.” For flute the options are a little different, to allow for half-holing in four directions.
Once your desired half-holes are enabled, you can hover your mouse over the keys (or look for the grey outlines on a touchscreen device) to see them. Click/tap on the desired half of the hole to “close” it, or again to re-open it. The “open” ones will not appear in your downloaded image.
clarinet
bassoon
recorder
upper
lower
flute
Lengthwise upper
Lengthwise lower
Widthwise proximal
Widthwise distal
More complicated but flexible way
If you need to turn on only certain half-holes, or mix upper with lower, etc., you will have to roll up your sleeves a bit more. Open the “Keywork details” menu and look for the top-level “Half-holes” heading. Organized beneath this you will see all the available half-holes, organized into groups like “Lower half holes.” I suggest adjusting the settings as follows:
“Half-holes” = Always
Each subgroup containing a desired half-hole, such as “Lower half holes” = Always
Each desired individual half-hole = “As needed”
Each undesired individual half-hole = “Never”
That will make the desired half-holes visible when you “close” them, and invisible otherwise.
In the following example, I have set the clarinet’s left hand first finger upper hole and the left hand third finger lower hole as described.
If you anticipate using a certain half-hole configuration frequently, you can save it for future use. Set the half-holes (and other keywork) up how you want it, open the “Keywork details” menu, and look near the bottom of it for the “Custom key sets” submenu. Open that, type a name for your current set of keys, and click/tap “Add.”
Hello, friends. I’m excited to share the latest round of improvements to the Fingering Diagram Builder. Thanks to all for your suggestions and bug reports, for your donations (every little bit helps), and for sharing with me some of the cool things you are making with the fingering diagrams.
Okay, nerds. I got email from a composer acquaintance who pointed out, correctly but also politely, that the Fingering Diagram Builder was lacking a bit in the area of flute half-holing. Here is a minor release to fix that problem. Now you can do some different half-holes on an open-holed flute’s rings. Here is the most obvious kind:
Lengthwise upper half-hole
But this may also be useful:
Widthwise proximal half-hole
Or, hey, get creative with it:
A variety of half-holes. On the right hand third finger, I’ve overlapped a lengthwise upper half-hole and a widthwise distal half-hole. Works great if you have oddly-shaped fingers.
You can even do this if you want to. It’s no skin off my nose.
Gah
If you’re going for something relatively simple, a few clicks will do it. For the first example (lengthwise upper), click the “Keywork” tab on the menu, then “Keywork details.” Scroll down quite a bit and set “Open holes” to “always” and “Lengthwise upper half-holes” to “always.” Now you are in business. For the key that you want, click the main key (biggest circle) on the diagram, then the open half of the hole, then the closed half of the hole. Bam.
I’m interested in making the FDB useful for new and interesting kinds of fingering diagrams, so let me hear your requests for future versions. Stay tuned for more new features and improvements that are already in the planning stages.
One thing I wanted to do in this release is give something back to the very generous and sexy people who have been kind enough to use the PayPal donation link to show their support over the years, so I’ve added some special exclusive features for donors. Most of those features are geared toward those doing large or involved projects, such as for publication.
To be clear, none of the old features have been put behind a paywall, and with this release and future releases I’ll keep working on improvements for the free users, too. And you can get the donors-only features with a one-time donation of literally any amount of your choice. (If you’ve donated before, you can try the “Are you a previous donor?” link to activate your special features, but you might have to email me so I can fix it for you manually, especially if your donation was a few years ago.)
Anyway, here’s what’s new:
Some weird/cool new key sets like Kingma-system flutes, the Redgate oboe, and the Contraforte. I’m flying a little blind on those since I don’t exactly have those instruments laying around, so if you’re an expert let me know what tweaks are needed.
Downloads in .gif format (in addition to the previously-available .png and .tif). For some purposes .gifs won’t look as nice as .pngs, but the file sizes are very compact, which is useful in some situations. And for donors, you can also download in .svg format, which gives you basically unlimited scalability with no loss of image quality. .Png and .svg downloads also now get lossless compression, which you can turn off if for some reason you want to.
Diagrams can be rotated 90° in either direction. Donors can also mirror them, which I think is a strange idea but lots of people have requested it.
Image backgrounds can be white (like before), or now also transparent.
Some more flexibility for donors: finer control of image size and line thickness, and an editable color palette. Donors also have some new options for how images are cropped.
You can still, as before, let the FDB automatically provide unique filenames for your downloaded images or name each one manually. But now you can also type placeholders: %i to auto-insert the name of the current instrument, %k for the key set, and %c for an auto-incrementing counter. It’s hard to explain, but try it out and I think you’ll see it’s pretty easy and useful.
In addition to downloading images to your device or uploading to Dropbox, you can also post them to Imgur. That gives you quick-and-easy shareability of images on all the social media sites, and you don’t need to create an account or anything.
People have been rightfully baffled for years by the powerful but undocumented “Keywork details” thing. That hasn’t gone away, but many of the instruments now have a more user-friendly interface for turning certain keys on or off. I hope to add to and refine these interfaces in response to the continuing frustrated emails. It has also become abundantly clear that, while I’ve tried to make everything as intuitive as possible, it’s time for a help page.
The FDB can, if you like, remember the fingering you were working on in a previous session. (This feature is turned off by default.) I don’t expect that many people need multiple visits to the FDB to complete one fingering diagram, but it’s handy if, say, you accidentally navigate away.
Once again, a thorough visual refresh and lots of little interface tweaks.
This one is boring but important: basically a ground-up rebuild of the FDB’s guts, using smarter coding than I knew how to do nearly nine years ago when I first released it. (For the code-savvy, I’ve replaced my spaghetti jQuery code with slightly-less-pasta-like Vue.js code.) That will hopefully help keep it running reliably and maintainably on modern web browsers for the better part of another decade.
Please do check it out, and send me your bug reports and other feedback.
Two months ago I introduced the Fingering diagram builder, something that I hoped people would find useful for quickly and easily creating fingering diagrams for woodwind instruments. Since then, something over 1,000 fingering diagrams have been downloaded, which I think is a nice start.
Many of those have been saxophone fingerings, and I attribute this to some kind mentions among the saxophone-blogger community (thanks Doron, Eric, David, Neal, Alistair, and Anton!).
Now I’m pleased to announce the new-and-of-course-improved version 0.2. Go take it for a spin, or read on about the new goodies:
For a while now I’ve maintained lists of woodwind doublers’ websites and blogs, but, as it turns out, a number of fine woodwind doublers also have entertaining and/or informative Twitter feeds. Starting today, you can check them out on this site, or head on over to Twitter to “follow.”
