A fingering chart taped to the band-room wall is either a teaching tool or wallpaper, and the difference is setup. This guide covers the practical side: which of the free printable charts to print, where each one earns its place, how to set up printing so the diagrams survive a school photocopier, and how to use the blank worksheets as the fastest fingering assessment you will ever run.
The three sets worth printing
You do not need every chart in every format. Three sets cover a school year:
1. The wall set (filled charts, one per instrument in your programme). Print the filled chart for each instrument you teach, at the largest size your printer manages cleanly — A3/ledger if you have it, two tiled Letter pages taped together if you don't. Laminate them. Wall charts live at playing height near the front, not above the whiteboard where they are decoration. A wall chart's job is to answer "how do I play this note?" in the ten seconds before a student would otherwise put a hand up mid-rehearsal.
2. Folder sets (filled charts, Letter/A4, one per student). One per student, in the front of the practice folder. Folder charts get used at home, which is where fingering questions actually happen. Print these from the same PDFs as the wall set — on this site both come from the same data as the online charts, so a student who checks the website at home, the folder at practice and the wall in class sees one consistent fingering. Mixed sources are how students end up "sure" a note is played two different ways.
3. Blank worksheets (per instrument, as many as you need). The blank version of each chart — note names, empty diagrams — is an assessment instrument disguised as a worksheet. Print a term's worth at the start of term; they cost almost nothing and you will use them weekly (see below).
Printing settings that keep diagrams honest
Fingering diagrams live and die on one distinction: filled circle versus open circle. Settings that protect it:
- Print at 100% scale, never "fit to page" on a different paper size than the PDF was laid out for — our PDFs are laid out for both US Letter and A4, so pick the matching one rather than scaling. - Greyscale is fine — by design. These diagrams use filled/open/half-filled circles, not colour, specifically so school copiers don't destroy them. If your copier has a "text/photo" mode, choose text: it hardens the circle edges. - Test one copy before running thirty. Photocopy the photocopy: if the second generation still shows clear filled vs open circles, the set will survive the term's worth of re-copying that school charts inevitably get. - Card or laminated paper for wall sets; ordinary paper for worksheets. Students write on worksheets, so don't waste lamination there — but do print worksheets single-sided, because the back becomes the place they sketch the fingering they keep getting wrong.
Using the wall chart without stopping the rehearsal
Teach the class the routine in week one: hear the note name → find the row → set the fingering → play when counted in. Point at the chart, never shout a fingering across the room ("one-two-three, one-two" helps one student and confuses eleven). For the first month, keep the class's current notes un-greyed and cover the rest of the wall chart with a strip of paper you move as the range grows — a full chromatic chart is information overload for a beginner, and a visible "we have unlocked this much" strip is quietly motivating.
Seat-work tip: when you introduce a new note, project its note page (the big diagram plus the fingering in words) rather than the full chart. Thirty students reading one diagram together beats thirty students hunting a 40-row table.
Blank worksheets: the two-minute fingering check
The routine: name or play five notes from the current range; students draw each fingering on the blank chart; swap with a partner and check against the filled chart or the wall; you circulate and see, in one lap of the room, exactly who has confused E and F, whose B♭ is creative, and which section needs tomorrow's first five minutes. It is silent, it is fast, it produces a mark-book-ready artefact if your school wants one, and students treat it as a game if you run it as one ("fingering bingo" with called notes works embarrassingly well up to about age thirteen).
Use the same worksheet for homework: "fill in the fingerings for tonight's piece, from memory, then check against your folder chart and correct in another colour." The corrections in the second colour are the learning, made visible.
Keeping the set current
Charts change less than students think, but check your wall set each year against the online version — on this site, corrections from the report-an-error process land in the data first and regenerate everything, so a reprinted PDF is the cheapest accuracy audit in music education. If a student finds a disagreement between your wall chart and their method book, treat it as a lesson, not a problem: alternate fingerings are real, the chart marks them, and knowing why two sources differ (an alternate, a different system like German recorder fingering, a misprint) is worth more than either fingering.
The digital half: projector and tablets
Print is half the system; the other half is the screen you already have. The routine that works in real classrooms: introduce every new note on the projector from its note page — one diagram, full-screen, with the fingering in words — because thirty students reading one big diagram together learn it faster than thirty students hunting a forty-row table. Keep the printed wall chart for the hundred small questions after that, and let students with tablets or Chromebooks use the online Finder for homework queries ("show me the fingering for…") rather than image-search roulette, where the first result is as likely to be a wrong or mirrored diagram as a right one. Mirrored diagrams deserve a special warning: a chart photographed or scanned backwards swaps the hands, and every year some student diligently learns a note the wrong way round from a reversed image. If a student's fingering looks like a familiar one in a mirror, check the source before correcting the child — the chart may be the thing that is wrong, and saying so in front of the class teaches more about sources than a term of lectures.