Today’s video is about how to write fingerings in your sheet music.

There are many benefits to writing fingerings in your sheet music whether you are a beginner or a professional player.

1. They can be used as a short cut to learning your music faster.
2. They can help you prevent making simple errors while reading notes that seem similar to you.
3. They can promote consistency in your practice.

Let’s talk about these benefits one by one.

First: If you are new to learning how to read sheet music, reading fingerings can be faster for most peoples brains to process initially than associating a black dot with a letter name and then associating the letter name with a finger. Teaching your mind to associate a black dot with a finger is much faster. However, if you want to learn note names, then you’d want to use this method sparingly because you can get dependent on it. Using this method with no limits is probably safer for adult beginners than with children because there are probably more long term benefits to children learning letter names instead of fingerings. It will help them with music school and music theory later in life.

Second: There are some notes that are easily confused when you are first learning because they may appear close to each other in the music and both may be on a line or a space. If you find that you are often confusing a few notes, just write the fingerings in and this will help you make fewer mistakes, which will help you learn the notes faster.

Third: Writing in notes for certain passages will help consistency. Consistency in practicing is KEY. Remember, practicing is all about playing something correctly, as many times as you can. This is the most efficient way to teach your brain to always perform an action the way you want it to. If you have a difficult passage in your music that requires strings crossings or shifting, then you should take the time to write in your desired fingering and make sure you ALWAYS follow that fingering.