musescore / musescore/MuseScore
Add automatic fingering for brass instruments
@avvvvve is already working on this.
Since Jun 13, 2025.
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Description
Your idea
Hi! I would like to implement this feature but want to discuss the best way of doing it before proceeding! I've created a plugin to help us format the musics we play in carnival. They are all available here and we use musescore heavily for doing it! Adding the fingering is a big part of this because it enables a beginner to play a lot of things never saw before, focusing on the sound and instrument practice.
I thought about adding a Fingering entry into the Tools menu, so we can click and add the fingering to the notes. Or maybe even an option that would automatically keep track of the note changes and add the fingering accordingly.
This logic works fine for brass instruments with pistons (trumpet, euphonium, piston trombone, tuba, ...) and slide (trombone). There is the traditional fingering style that just tells you the position (that is what trombones use) and there is also the alternative of showing a combination of the finger number and 0 for all pistons released. Other brass band instruments might not benefit from it, like sax and clarinet, as the fingering is much more complex. Also, other types of instruments might also not be able to use it, since it's fingering is also more complex.
All that said, I would like to know your thoughts on how this should look like and how I should implement it. I already have my dev environment up and running and would like to start with this feature!
Problem to be solved
Adding fingering to a full sheet is time consuming. For piston and slide instrument the fingering can be automatically added as some plugins already do it. Having fingering being added automatically to the brass parts will help saving time when engraving a music sheet for playing on the streets.
Prior art
We created a plugin for solving this problem, it works fine with MU3 in the dock dialog but MU4 only implemented yet the dialog plugins, so the usability was compromised. I thought that maybe embedding this into the system would be a better idea.
Additional context
In Belo Horizonte/MG, Brasil, we started a lot of carnival blocks around 15 years ago. In the beginning there were very few brass instruments, the bands were mainly percussion. With time a lot of people started playing brass instruments and creating not just carnival blocks but also brass bands. The fingering addition into the music sheets had a key role of reducing the entry level of people to the instrument. It's one thing less to learn in the beggining and if people really want to learn how to read music sheets it will be easier if they already know how the fingering works. The rest is hard enough to learn! Creating this plugin (that not only adds fingering but also helps us formatting the books we assemble in this site) was a key step into saving us time to not stress out too much on formatting the music sheet books we do, the last year it had 130 musics for 5 different instruments!
I personally would love to contribute more to musescore as it was a key piece in our success. Shifting our musics to use musescore enabled us to automate a big part of the process, by generating all the svg and meta data and enabling us to build a static website.
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