Free download: New orchestration of the Creston saxophone sonata

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.”

Enjoy!