App review: Fingering Woodwinds for iPhone
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Recently, I took a lesson over Skype with Jay Mason. Jay is one of L.A.'s finest woodwind artists, and he and I were discussing some of finer points on how to manage playing multiple instruments at a high level. One great tip he told me utilized the ever expanding mobile web. Jay has bookmarked on his Blackberry the Woodwind Fingering Guide which he uses from time to time both in the practice room and on gigs to quickly look up alternate and trill fingerings. Being an iPhone user since the '3G' model, I'm surprised I hadn't thought of that myself. Instantly, not only had I bookmarked the site, I added it as an icon for quick access. While the site isn't optimized for mobile (and quite frankly looks very web 1.0), it still is plenty useful either at home or on the job and I highly recommend bookmarking it on your desktop, laptop, tablet, or mobile device. I found it immediately useful as I was practicing for an upcoming show, The Music Man, and had to learn a lot of high trill fingerings on flute and piccolo.
Given how huge apps are, I figured there might be something in Apple's App Store. And lo and behold there is "an app for that." It's called Fingering Woodwinds for iPhone ($4.99, iTunes link). The developer does have a separate iPad version as well for $6.99. While I would like to review that one as well, sadly at the time of writing I don't own an iPad.
Fingering Woodwinds for iPhone is a great app. It's not perfect, but every woodwind artist and band director (or someone who deals with multiple instruments) should spend the $5, well worth it in my opinion. In fact, for the band directors who need quick access to both brass and woodwind fingerings, Patrick Q. Kelly has an app for that too.
The design of the app is good. It's pretty and the information is presented well. I really like how the fingerings are displayed over a graphic of the actual instrument. Bret Pimentel showed how to make a bad fingering chart, and while no fingering chart is perfect, I think this does a pretty good job at displaying the keys clearly without being too complicated. Not only are standard fingerings marked, there is a button for alternates as well. Besides standard and alternate fingerings, trill fingerings in various intervals are also an option.
All that being said, there are some parts of this app I don't understand. Part of it may just be how I use it and maybe someone can find these features useful, but for me it's a waste of space. Number one is the inclusion of a piano. Since one can play piano using any number of fingerings, why might someone looking for woodwind fingerings need this? I also don't understand the need for audio. It's just a MIDI piano sound. Perhaps if one was expecting one note but it was sounding different. Muting the sound is easy, so that's a plus. I also don't understand the need for concert pitch to be larger and higher up on the screen, making it appear more important. While it is useful and appreciated information to some, in my opinion the written pitch should precede concert pitch.
Being a touch interface, one would think the best method of selecting the note you want a fingering for is by simply touching it on the staff. While this may work on a tablet sized screen, not so much on the smaller screens. When I first downloaded the app, getting the note I wanted was a pain. And finding notes in ledger lines was even worse. Flats and sharps, forget it. Instructions were to swipe left or right for flats and sharps, but often my swipe was either unrecognized or moved to a different note completely. Thankfully, Mr. Kelly is not a developer who sits on his hands. I was delighted to see an update to the app (ver. 3.3) a week ago, which gives the user an up and down slider for selecting notes. This is a welcomed improvement indeed. I am certainly looking forward to more improvements.
The other missteps this app makes really have to do with specifics on the different woodwind instruments themselves. Some ideas may be easier to implement than others. For example, while you can select between flute and piccolo, the picture and finger chart on the left doesn't change from a standard B-foot flute. And indeed, you are given the fingering for low B, C, and Db on piccolo. Similarly, most modern day baritone saxophones have a low A key, but the app suggests low A is out of range. Low Bb is even hard to find and although a fingering is shown, the note is greyed out implying out of range for all saxes. Oddly enough, this isn't a problem on bass clarinet, adding keys only when necessary. Hopefully those variants in the instruments will be corrected. While I don't expect every possible key be posted (like the newer left side Eb), some of the range issues are pretty much standard.
My last issue actually deals with the accuracy of the charts. For probably 90% of the charts on standard instrumentation things are fine. However, due to the nature of altissimo fingerings, there are many more workable alternates that aren't referenced in the app. For example, altissimo G on clarinet (8va G above the staff) has at least a dozen fingerings only 4 are shown in the app, but the 2 I use the most aren't listed. I do see different altissimo fingerings for alto and tenor, which is good (although many more options aren't listed), but none for soprano or baritone. On the bassoon, the flick (or snip) keys are referenced but not referenced on the notes needed for flicking. Although in fairness, I haven't seen that in any bassoon fingering chart, and I don't really know why. There are some alternates for trills as well that are left out as well. My hope is Mr. Kelly makes a sizeable amount of money on his iOS apps that he can reinvest in the product and ask the best players and educators in New York (Mr. Kelly is an AFM Local 802 member) to add and edit to the database accordingly.
Overall, a very worthwhile app to have in your collection. Skip one grande latte a week and get this app. I will buy the iPad version as well, someday. I hope Mr. Kelly begins expanding the app to other platforms (Andriod, webOS, Blackberry, Mac/PC, etc.) as well as extends the database of fingerings even further. It is a huge tool for modern day woodwind artists, as well as teachers needing quick access to fingerings.
