fing 0.2.0

🖐️ A universal representation of fingering systems for winds, reeds, and brass 🖐️

🖐️ fing: Represent all fingering systems for wind instruments 🖐️

fing is a general representation of fingering systems for woodwinds, reeds, and keyed brass.

fing has three goals:

1. To represent existing and new fingering systems as documents that can easily be created, read and understood by humans and computers alike.

2. To easily create classic and new types of fingering charts, tables, images and even animations, for existing and new fingering systems.

3. To be adaptable to any keyed monophonic instrument, any human language, and any definition of note.

Example: recorder fingering

Here's a full specification of the Baroque fingerings for the recorder family:

https://github.com/rec/fing/blob/main/fingerings/recorder-fingering.toml

It's written in a format called TOML designed to be straight-forward for both humans and computers to read and write.

It isn't trying to be good for learners, but fing also provides a general system for making fingering charts without writing Python programs.

This short layout document together with the specification above, created this image:

A final chart would have "more stuff" on it; this shows how it can be done in one page of layout.

How does fing work, in 90 seconds?

fing represents fingering systems using Buttons: keys, pads, buttons, or switches that can be pressed, holes that can be covered, etc.

A Button definition looks like this:

[buttons.octave]
short_name = 'oct'
press = "left-thumb"
description = 'Half-cover the thumb hole with the nail'

Fingerings are defined in terms of those Buttons, like this:

[fingerings]
all = 'oct lt l1 l2 l3 r1 r2 r3 r3h r4 r4h cb  '

C_1 = 'lt  l1  l2  l3  r1  r2  r3  r4      '
Db1 = 'lt  l1  l2  l3  r1  r2  r3  r4h     '
D_1 = 'lt  l1  l2  l3  r1  r2  r3          '
Eb1 = 'lt  l1  l2  l3  r1  r2  r3h         '

... many more ...

General "modifier" Buttons like in electronic wind instruments are also possible.

There's a separate layout system to describe how to render a Fingering System into graphical Fingering Charts in a simple, standard text-based graphical language called Scalable Vector Graphics or SVG.

The result can be displayed in any browser or web page, edited by hand as text or with free and open source tools, embeded in a PDF, Illustrator, Photoshop or other graphical document, and printed at any resolution.

Appendix: notes on SVG

If you're thinking of creating new fingering chart formats, the SVG snippets aren't so terrible - here's all of them from the recorder fingering chart.

[layout]
styles = '''
.outline { fill: white; stroke: black; stroke-width: 1.5; }
'''
[layout.defs]
pad = '<circle cx="50" cy="50" r="50" />'
little-hole = '<circle cx="80" cy="55" r="20" />'
big-hole = '<circle cx="30" cy="30" r="30" />'
horizontal-line = '<rect x="0" y="50" width="120" height="1" style="fill: black;"/>'
octave = '<path d="  M 0,50   A 50,50 0 0 0 100,50   Z  " fill="black" />'

and then you re-use them like this:

[layout.pieces.left-thumb.parts]
_off = 'pad @ outline'
oct = 'pad @ outline + octave'
left-thumb = 'pad'

[layout.pieces.right-3.parts]
_off = 'little-hole @ outline + big-hole @ outline'
right-3 = 'little-hole + big-hole'
right-3-half = 'little-hole @ outline + big-hole'

where the image for the oct key is the circular pad Def with the outline style, plus the octave Def, a half-filled circle.

The path instruction can be tricky, but this is something that LLMs do very well, though that single line octave above is the only part of this whole project that was done with an LLM (which, in fairness, came up with a better solution than I did, so I used it.)