Fingering (music)
In music, fingering, or on stringed instruments sometimes also called stopping, is the choice of which fingers and hand positions to use when playing certain musical instruments. Fingering typically changes throughout a piece; the challenge of choosing good fingering for a piece is to make the hand movements as comfortable as possible without changing hand position too often. A fingering can be the result of the working process of the composer, who puts it into the manuscript, an editor, who adds it into the printed score, or the performer, who puts his or her own fingering in the score or in performance.
This article is about hand positioning on a musical instrument. For other uses, see Fingering.A substitute fingering is an alternative to the indicated fingering, not to be confused with finger substitution. Depending on the instrument, not all the fingers may be used. For example, saxophonists do not use the right thumb and string instruments (usually) only use the fingers and not the thumbs.
False fingering and alternate fingering[edit]
The term "false fingering" is used in instruments such as woodwinds, brass, and stringed instruments where different fingerings can produce the same note, but where the timbre or tone quality is distinctly different from each other. For example, on a guitar, the same note played on a wound string will sound significantly different from one played on a solid wire string, so playing the same note on different strings in short succession can accentuate the different tone colors without actually changing the note. When the note is played in such a way as to draw the distinction from the expected tone quality (which will vary depending on the exact musical passage it appears in) it is often called a "false fingering". The technique is common in jazz contexts, especially on wind instruments such as the saxophone. If the tone quality is not distinctly different between the two notes, the term "alternate fingering" is often used instead.[13]