u/TVTvirus

I play bass and I write a lot of my own parts, and I was spending more time

pencilling in fingerings than actually practising. So I made a MuseScore plugin

that does the first pass for me. It's free and open source, and I'd genuinely

like some ears on it that are better than mine.

**What it does:** you select a passage (or nothing, for the whole part), hit the

plugin, and it writes string + finger above every note and colours the noteheads

by position. Blue is 1st, green 2nd, yellow 3rd, and so on, so you can see a

shift coming from across the room.

**The part I actually care about:** it isn't just picking the lowest position it

can find. The first version I wrote did that and it made some genuinely dumb

choices, like jumping to another string rather than doing a simple 1st-to-2nd

shift. So I rewrote the scoring around the rules people actually teach:

- at least two notes per position before you move

- never cross strings for a half step

- fast passage → stay put and cross strings; slow melodic line → shift along one string

- don't cross onto a new string with the same finger, it leaves a gap

- no open strings on long lyrical notes, but they're fine as passing notes in a run

- shift up landing on a low finger, shift down landing on a high one

It reads note durations and the rests around them, so the same phrase gets

fingered differently at semiquavers than it does at minims, which I think is the

bit that makes it feel less robotic. It handles double stops and thumb position

too.

Positions aren't weighted equally either. Half position is the most awkward spot

on the neck and the plugin treats it that way; 1st is home; the in-between

positions are allowed but it takes some convincing. All of that is one table at

the top of the file, so if your hand disagrees with mine you can just edit the

numbers.

Screenshot below is its output on a few test cases, one per line, with a note

saying what each one is meant to show.

**What I'd love from you lot:**

- Anywhere it gives you something you'd never actually play. That's the useful

feedback, and screenshots of the ugly bits are perfect.

- Does the amount of writing on the page feel right? It labels every finger on

slow notes but thins out in fast runs, because otherwise the text stacks up

into an unreadable staircase.

- Anything obvious I've missed. Harmonics and the 1-2-3 hand in the upper neck

aren't in there yet, and it ignores slurs because the plugin API doesn't expose

them reliably.

- Is Simandl even what most of you want? I could add Rabbath positions if there's

appetite for it.

MuseScore 4.4+, drop the .qml in your plugins folder and restart. There's a

Spanish mode too, if you'd rather read Sol/Re/La than G/D/A.