Some Reflections About Britten's "Harpejji Notation System" — part 1

In 2020, when I started to share my experience about harpejji technique, I realized that I needed a way to communicate precisely about fingerings. I used a tab notation that allowed me to express what I wanted. In order to encourage information sharing in the community, I developed an editor that was later included in Marcodi’s player resources on their website. In the meantime, this notation has become some kind of de facto standard for sharing harpejji fingerings.

But of course this kind of tab notation can only go so far, and I’ve been toying with the idea of annotating regular sheet music with fingerings ever since, without finding a satisfying way.

That’s why I was thrilled when Jenova shared on Discord a link to a post by Michael Britten that proposed a full, coherent fingering notation system for the harpejji.

We had some exchanges with Michael in the meantime, and I could have written him an email about what I think of his system. But I think think this discussion ultimately belongs to the community, and that’s why I answer publicly on this blog (I also think these discussions could still be of interest in a few years, which rules out messaging platforms and social media that are at best very fragile when it comes to going back in time…).

So this post presents my reflections about Michael’s proposition. If you haven’t read his post and/or watched his video, do it now because I’m afraid my post won’t make much sense otherwise. You probably also want to watch Jacob Collier’s video and might want to have a look at its original transcription by Suilven Chambers, without fingering notation.

General considerations

First, I’d like to thank Michael for the enormous amount of work he put in proposing a full and coherent system. The tremendous job of annotating the whole Jacob Collier’s transcription shows his level of dedication to finding a system that works.

I think Michael’s system fundamental ideas make perfect sense. In particular, I like the following insights:

• We don’t need a “Y axis” in the notation as it is already present in the notes themselves.
• Use relative notation for strings, which is both more readable and allows to take advantage of the isomorphic property of the harpejji fretboard.
• Use “bookmarks” (what he calls “references slashes”) to simplify notation when there are a lot of “jumps”.

However, I also have a few concerns about the details of his proposition. Mainly:

• I don’t like the notation for absolute string position.
• I think the system as it is now graphically mixes notes and fingerings and spreads fingering information too much. I think it would be more readable to group fingering information in one place.
• The glyphs chosen by Michael look great, but I’m not sure how to reproduce them. Maybe we should select things that everybody can use, whatever software/platform/font they’re using (or even when annotating by hand).
• As impressive as the Collier’s transcription is, I guess most of the time the fingerings won’t be as detailed. For pedagogical purposes, one might want to notate every fingering note by note. But in day to day work, a musician is likely to only notate fingerings in a few tricky places. I think this should be taken into account.

In the rest of this post, I’ll develop these consideration and suggest adaptations to the system.

Two more remarks before diving in:

• I do appreciate and respect Michael’s work a lot. I’m suggesting adaptations of his system because I think we can be more clever collectively than alone, but that’s by no way a criticism of the awesome work he’s done!

• I don’t think that Michael, or me, or anyone really, can decide of a notation that will become standard. We can discuss of a good solution and suggest ideas to the community, but the standard notation will emerge from the community along the years. So keep this in mind when reading all this - these are only ideas, that want nothing more than living and evolving for making the harpejji community more alive!

With that in mind, let’s consider my concerns about the method one by one.

Absolute string positions

To be honest, this is the only point where I completely disagree with the proposed solution. What I don’t like:

• First and mostly: OK to call a string C string because its lowest note is C, but I categorically refuse to call a string A string “because” its lowest note is B♭ (same for F and G, of course). If we are to name the strings after their lowest note, so let’s really use the lowest note, not some random approximation!

• The proposed solution is specific to the G16, and there’s no way to adapt it to another model without looking at the G16 specs.

• The proposed notation conflicts with standard chord notation. In Michael’s Mary had a little lamb, any musician who did not read his post would interpret the first “G” as a G major chord (and wonder what the “A1” is).

Actually I’m not sure at all what a good solution would be. Technically a fret number would do the trick, but I never think of my harpejji in terms of fret number, and I know I’m not alone.

What I’d try at this point would be

• Use the full note name with real octave as string name. So the G16 strings would be called C2, D2, E2, F#2, G#2, B♭2, C3, …, F#4.
• To avoid conflicts with chord notation, write the string name in lower case just above (or below) the fingering, in parenthesis.

So the beginning of “Mary..” would be

This notation doesn’t conflict (too much) with chord notation, it doesn’t lie about string lowest notes, and I can find the nearest string on my K24 or M5 without having to lookup range information about the G16 before interpreting it correctly.

But is it more readable than the original version? barely. Does it look nice? Not really. I think this would be a better solution than Michael’s original idea, but actually I hope someone in the community comes up with a better idea!

(And if you can never remember the octave number for a given note, don’t worry, you’re not alone. I can’t either, because it’s not very useful in my daily practise. But if the standard notation includes this information, I’ll learn it quickly - and so will you! And in case of real difficulties, it’s always possible to put stickers with string names on the tuner channel!)

One last thing about absolute string notation: as has already been noted on Discord, most of the time we don’t really care about absolute position. Given the isomorphic nature of the harpejji, starting on any instance of a given note should work as the rest of the system uses relative notation. So most of the examples below will omit this information.

However, I still think we should be able to include this information, because there are cases where it is relevant. Suppose you want to play Debussy’s Clair de Lune on the harpejji (good luck!). When reaching this part, you’ll probably have to select very carefully on what string you start the left hand arpeggios in order not to collide hands and/or not to run out of strings:

(Sheet music CC-BY-NC by Les Éditions Outremontaises)

Other possible uses of absolute positioning include repeats in classical music, where jumping back in the score might imply considerable hand shifting (and loss of context), and special effects like playing on very high frets of lower strings (I love how it sounds!).

Grouping fingering information

Michael’s string position modifiers are a great idea. They mostly match how I think about the instrument and allow to take advantage of the isomorphic property of the fretboard.

However, I’m not sure the placement is optimal. Let’s have a look at his simple “Mary had a little lamb”:

Let’s focus on the right hand. To know what to do, I must look at the note, then down to the string modifier, then up to the finger number. The information about the fingering is distributed over two relatively remote places.

I think it would be much easier to follow if the information was grouped in the same place. Something like

I find it easier to follow, with a few added benefits:

• The fingerings don’t look like accents, and it is still possible to add accents to the music if desired.
• The music itself and the fingerings are in separate places. That means the music is still readable by someone playing another instrument, with no fingering information in the way.

Using standard glyphs

Now I have another concern. Michael found very nice glyphs for his ideas, but as far as I know, they are not standard Unicode characters. I managed to reproduce something similar in my engraving software, but it’s nowhere as nice, and it was already difficult to do.

So I’m wondering if that wouldn’t be a good idea to use standard glyphs to make access to this system easier.

For notating “skip one string to the right (or left) and play on the following one with finger #3”, Michael uses something like •>3 and <•3, but with custom glyphs. To stay with Unicode characters, I considered

• ..3 and 3..
• ''3 and ,,3
• ²3 and 3²
• … and some others.

But most of them are not very readable and/or need too much space.

Looking at existing Unicode characters, I found this solution which seems interesting:

• 1 string left or right: ․ (standard point or Unicode #2024)
• 2 strings left or right: : (standard colon)
• 3 strings left or right: ⁝ (Unicode #205D)
• 4 strings left or right: ⁞ (Unicode #205E)

Bigger leaps could be combinations:

• 5 = 4+1: ⁞․
• 6 = 4+2: ⁞⁚ (I’m using U+205A for the 2 here)

So we would get something like

I’m aware that this is slightly more abstract than the very intuitive version of Michael. But I think it is still very readable with some practise, doesn’t take much space and uses widely available Unicode characters. Note also that we will see another, potentially simpler, version of this example after having introduced bookmarks.

You might wonder how to type these characters on your computer. The specifics vary from platform to platform; depending on your preferences,you could simply copy-paste the above characters, search the internet to find out how to type Unicode characters on your machine, or (as I did) configure your keyboard to add key combinations that type them.

One thing that bothers me is that there’s an off-by-one incompatibility in the number of dots as compared with Michael’s version: > gets ․ and •> gets :. That means that the two systems wouldn’t cohabit very well so we as a community had better selecting a version quickly and sticking to it!

Potential conflicts

The notation proposed above removes some potential conflicts with existing musical notation, especially nuances and accents. Some confusion might remain in the specific case of figured bass but I think that using different places for fingerings and figuration removes any ambiguity in interpreting the notation:

Progressive enhancement

In pedagogical material or very complicated pieces (like the Collier’s transcription), it can be interesting to notate precisely every fingering detail over the whole piece. But in many practical cases, we are likely to only notate a fingering here and there, where we feel they’re not intuitive.

I think Michael’s proposition (with or without my suggestions) is perfectly usable in this case, except for one thing: there’s no way to notate “play this note on the same string as the last one”. If you notate every fingering, that’s not a problem: just don’t write any modifier. But if you want to notate only some fingerings, you need to be able to specify this. I’d suggest to prefix the finger number with an equal sign (=).

For instance, if I was annotating “Mary…” just for myself, and decided to begin with finger 3 and play the d and c on the same string, I’d probably only notate this, the other fingering being completely logical to me:

Slashes

If we try to group all fingering information in the same place, we still have to find something for the slashes of Michael proposition. He uses them in two ways: Slashed chords and reference slashes.

Slashed chords

I tried to use a simple slash (/) in the fingerings, but I don’t think it’s very legible. I’d suggest to rename slash chords into anchored chords (following Michael’s own terminology: “Slashed chords are anchored in space”) and draw a circle around the anchoring note. For instance, a F major cadence with the voicings described here would look like this:

Note that if your software makes it difficult to draw a circle around a fingering information, you could also use Unicode characters #2460 and following: ①, ②, …

Reference slashes

The other use of the slash is the great idea of reference slashes. If we try to get this back in the fingerings themselves, we cannot use exactly the same system, because the position of the slash in the staff matters.

My proposition would be to reserve some characters like *, +, @ and maybe others to serve as bookmarks, as follows: to bookmark a string position, write the symbol just after the fingering. To “use” this bookmark, write the same symbol just before the fingering. For instance, the same F major cadence as above, but arpeggiated could be notated like this:

For passages that have two voices in one hand, it’s possible to use several bookmarks. Let’s re-consider the example we used before when defining the position modifiers:

We could notate the exact same fingerings with one fixed bookmark * for the low C, and a “moving bookmark” + for the scale:

The 2* on the first note means “play with finger 2 and remember this position”. The subsequent * mean “play in same position, same finger”.

The .3+ on the second note means “move one string to the right, play with finger 3 and remember this position”. Then on the fourth note, +.4+ means “start from the remembered position, move one string to the right, play with finger 4 and remember this new position”.

This bookmark notation has an added benefit, especially when sight-reading: with Michael’s reference slashes, when you get to the slash, you have to look back to find where the last corresponding note was, and maybe remember with what finger you played it. With the bookmarks suggested above, you’ll already know when playing the “reference note” that you have to store this information in your mind, potentially removing the need to look back later.

Putting it all together

Well, I think that’s it. My new proposition might seem very different from Michael’s at first sight, but it’s actually using exactly the same concepts, with the following adaptations:

• Make absolute string positions more logical;
• Group fingering information in the same place;
• Use widely available characters.

Let’s compare for example the two following measures from Collier’s transcription, first in Michael’s version:

Now with the modifications I’m suggesting:

I think the second version is more readable and a little bit less cluttered, but as I said before that’s not for me, nor for Michael, to decide, but ultimately for the community as a whole.

That could be it, but…

When writing this post, an idea got more and more insistent in my head: maybe we selected the wrong axis; maybe we should notate frets changes instead of string changes.

At first I thought that would be a rather equivalent way of doing things, but the more I think about it, the more reasons I see that it could work better.

This post is already quite long, so I won’t develop this idea here, but I intend to write a follow-up soon where I explore the pros and cons of using a fret-based notation system instead of a string-based one.

In the meantime, please react, comment, criticize - on Discord, on the Harpejji Hangout, on your own blog… Whatever, but we definitely need community interaction to collectively develop the best notation system. Since Michael opened the discussion (and thanks again for that!), now is the time, so express yourself!