fingering

Chopin sought to convey these moods through explicit performing directions about fingering, pedaling and slurring.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 29, 2026

"I tend now to play parts of chords, rather than fingering the whole damn thing. I use these shortcuts that would be a nightmare for a guitar teacher."

From BBC ● Nov. 21, 2023

She had a leopard scarf elegantly wrapped around her head and was fingering a glittering ring and staring blankly into the distance.

From Reuters ● Feb. 7, 2023

He looked away, fingering a frayed edge of the carpet.

From Salon ● Dec. 15, 2022

Because numbers are used in music to identify everything from beats to intervals to harmonics to what fingering to use, this naming system is sometimes less confusing.

From "Understanding Basic Music Theory" by Catherine Schmidt-Jones and Russel Jones

In junior high, he was given a battered cornet to play and, overnight, learned the fingerings of the instrument and the next day played “Pomp and Circumstance” for the band teacher.

From Washington Post ● Oct. 1, 2021

“My scores of Schumann, Chopin, Ravel, and Messiaen are still covered in the meticulous fingerings and often pointed criticisms that she would notate, bar after bar,” he wrote shortly after Loriod’s death, in 2010.

From The New Yorker ● Sep. 10, 2018

Students learn and practice on a chanter, an oboe-like instrument with the same fingerings as the bagpipe’s melody pipe.

From Washington Times ● Jan. 31, 2017

His strings also had a curious habit of snapping in the middle of a performance, forcing Paganini to continue playing on ever fewer strings, with ever more virtuosic fingerings.

From New York Times ● Jun. 19, 2013

Sometimes this makes things easier on instrumentalists; they may not have to learn different fingerings when they switch from one kind of saxophone to another, for example.

From "Understanding Basic Music Theory" by Catherine Schmidt-Jones and Russel Jones