Changing the staff-relative placement of fingerings

Dorico Pro automatically follows conventions for fingering placement, but you can show individual fingerings belonging to non-fretted instruments either above or below the staff, independently of your project-wide setting. You can do this for the current layout and frame chain only or for all layouts and frame chains.

According to convention, keyboard instrument fingering is positioned above the right-hand staff, and below the left-hand staff. String and brass instrument fingering is always positioned above the staff.

Note

These steps only apply to non-fretted instruments.

Prerequisite

  • If you are in Engrave mode, Graphic Editing is selected in the Engrave toolbox.

  • You have chosen the appropriate property scope for local properties.

Procedure

  1. Select the fingerings whose staff-relative placement you want to change. You can do this in Write mode and Engrave mode.
  2. In the Properties panel, activate Staff-relative position in the Fingering and Positions group.
  3. Choose one of the following options:

    • Above

    • Below

Result

The selected fingerings appear above/below the staff. If the property scope was set to Locally, this change only takes effect in the current layout and frame chain.

Tip

  • You can also change the staff-relative placement of fingerings by selecting them in Engrave mode and pressing F.

  • You can change the staff-relative placement of all fingerings project-wide to follow voice directions on the Fingering page in Engrave > Engraving Options.

    This can be useful in complex contrapuntal music where fingering may not be clear if it is only placed above the top staff and below the bottom staff.