Fingering and Articulation III

Playing on the Godin-Reynolds eleven-string is coming along better than expected: I can comfortably play through six of the twelve suites in my set now, and most of the rest are coming along well enough that I may try to play an entire gig on it soon. I've been doing all of the fingerings for this fugue on it, and there's nothing like constant piddling with an axe to get one comfortable on it.

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The PDF score and MP3 track for this fugue are now on my Downloads Page with the fingerings and articulations completed.

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My philosophy with respect to fingering and position indicatiors in music this complex is to just include all of them in the score. I reached this standpoint after many years of agonizing over how much was too much and how little was not enough: If you put it all in the score, you don't have to worry about those decisions. Not only that, but when learning a piece you can start at any point and know exactly where you are (That's a weird sounding sentence, but you know what I mean). Obviously, using a two-stave system for the music makes this quite a bit easier to pull off without the result getting messy.

As far as position indicators are concerned, I use them to indicate not only which fret the index finger is on, but also which fret the index finger is over if it is not actually deployed: Reading music on the guitar is difficult enough as it is, so every little hint helps. The layout logic is just a practical matter: Whatever falls most immediately within the line of sight and doesn't look cluttered.

All of these pages are pretty much in the bag, but as I get the piece up to speed, there will undoubtedly be numerous minor changes to the details.




Arranging the left hand fingerings to allow for the ties in the suspension/resolution chains required a few more position changes than would have otherwise been required, but as you can see they actually worked out very smoothly with the 4-3 and 11-10 chains on this page.




Concerning the musical changes I was contemplating in the previous post, I ended up splitting the difference: The F-sharp was a good addition to measure thirty-five, but measures thirty-nine and forty-three - where there are third relationships versus sixth relationships - did not really need any changes. On the other hand, adding the B-natural to the interior voice of measure forty-seven - where there are sixths again - is a definite improvement leading into the sixteenths that go to the final episode. Neither the changes in measure thirty-five nor those in measure forty-seven ended up causing any significant complications vis-a-vis the fingerings. In fact, the changes were quite simple to make.




I made some minor changes to the right hand part during the final episode, and it seems to flow quite a bit better now. The position indicators here really help with the reading, that's for sure.

The fingerings in measure fifty-nine and sixty cause abrupt position changes, but it's really not a problem at this tempo. There was a similar abrupt shift back in measure thirty-nine which isn't really all that bad either.

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I've never had any luck with flowers. In fact, a couple of comic-tragedies have attended me getting the idea into my head that giving flowers would be a good idea. Some guys swear by them though. If you get a reaction like this, I could see why.