A fingering chart looks like a secret code the first time you see one: rows of circles, some black, some white, a thumb hiding round the back, extra keys sprouting at the sides. It is not a code — it is a picture of the instrument, flattened. Once you know how to read a fingering chart, every chart for every instrument becomes readable in seconds, because they all follow the same handful of conventions. This guide teaches those conventions once, properly: what the circles mean, which way up the picture sits, where the thumbs and pinkies live, and how the brass diagrams differ. Keep it open next to any chart on this site and the code is broken for good.
The one idea underneath every chart
A fingering chart is a map of your fingers, not of the instrument's beauty. The chart-maker has taken the keys and holes your fingers touch, arranged them in the order your fingers meet them, and drawn one symbol per finger. A filled (black) circle means that finger is down — covering its hole or pressing its key. An open (white) circle means the finger is up. That single rule — black down, white up — is eighty percent of reading any woodwind chart ever printed. Everything else is geography: knowing which circle belongs to which finger.
Which way up, and which hand is which
Woodwind charts are drawn as if you are looking at the instrument held in playing position, from the front. The left hand is always the upper group of circles, the right hand the lower group — because that is how the hands stack on a real instrument, left above right, whatever instrument the family. On a standard six-hole layout the circles run in two columns of three: left index, middle, ring, then right index, middle, ring. If you hold your own hands up, palms away, fingers curled as if holding the instrument, your fingertips are standing in exactly the chart's arrangement. When in doubt, do that — your hands are the legend.
Charts are also almost always drawn for the player's perspective consistently, but beware the great chart trap: the mirrored diagram. A chart scanned or photographed backwards swaps the hands, and a beginner can practise a note wrong for weeks from a reversed image. The tell-tale signs of a mirrored chart are a thumb shown on the wrong side or side keys appearing on the left that you know live on the right. Every diagram on this site is drawn one consistent way, checked against its source data — but the warning is worth keeping for charts you meet elsewhere.
The thumb, the register key and the small print
Three symbols cause most beginner confusion, and all three sit outside the main grid.
The thumb is drawn separately, usually as a circle offset to the side or behind the top group, because on the real instrument your left thumb works the back of the instrument, out of sight. On flute charts the thumb symbol often has two positions — the B thumb key and the B♭ lever — and the chart will name which one a note uses. On recorder charts, a half-filled thumb circle means half-holing: the thumb opens a sliver of its hole, the technique that unlocks the high register.
The register or octave key — the little key your left thumb or palm presses to jump registers on clarinet and saxophone — is drawn as a small separate symbol, often labelled, and it is filled when the note needs it. Middle-register notes and their low-register twins frequently share identical main fingers and differ only in this key, which is why two rows of a chart can look the same until you check the thumb corner.
Pinky keys are drawn as small tabs or named boxes beside the main grid, because pinkies work clusters of keys rather than single holes. Good charts name them — E, F, G♯, C♯ on the clarinet's two pinky clusters, for instance — and the name is the instruction: press the key with that label. On this site's note pages the fingering is also written out in words ("left pinky E key") so a diagram is never the only explanation.
Half holes, alternate fingerings and other honest complications
A half-filled circle in the main grid means exactly what it suggests: cover half the hole. It appears on recorder (the thumb, and sometimes the first finger for high notes) and on a few folk instruments; on keyed instruments it is rare, because keys are either down or not.
Most notes have more than one fingering, and charts handle this in two ways: a second row, or a symbol marking the row as an alternate. The first fingering a chart lists is the basic — the standard one to learn — and alternates exist for specific jobs: passing quickly between two particular notes, correcting tuning, or trilling. Learn basics first, always. An alternate learned before its basic is a detour that feels like a shortcut for about a week.
A related convention: some charts draw trill keys — the small keys between the main fingers on clarinet and flute — as tiny circles in the gaps. They are not part of ordinary fingerings; they exist so a finger can flicker one note against its neighbour. If a chart shows small extra circles you are not meant to hold down, that is what they are, and the trill charts in this site's trill section use them constantly.
Enharmonic names: why B♭ and A♯ share a row
Charts list each fingering once, but music names some notes twice. B♭ and A♯ are the same sounding pitch and the same fingering, so most charts print one name — usually the flat — and expect you to know the other lives there too. This site's convention is consistent: flats (B♭, E♭, A♭, D♭) are the primary names, with F♯ the one sharp, and every note page states its enharmonic twin in words. When a chart seems to be "missing" A♯, it isn't — it is filed under B♭.
Brass charts: valves and positions instead of circles
Brass diagrams swap circles for numbers. A trumpet, cornet, euphonium or tuba chart lists each note with its valve combination — which of the three (or four) valves are down: open, 2, 1, 1+2 (or 3), 2+3, 1+3, 1+2+3, the seven combinations that lengthen the tube step by step. Reading them is pure lookup: the chart says 1+3, your first and third fingers press. Two things to know: the same seven combinations repeat at every harmonic, so a brass chart is really a map of which harmonic, which valves; and fingering alone does not choose the note — the lips choose the harmonic, which is why trumpet C and G are both "open."
The trombone has no valves to draw, so its charts list slide positions, 1 to 7: first position fully closed, each position an arm's-stretch further out. A trombone chart is therefore a table of positions per note, and the skill in reading it is noticing that the same note can appear in two positions — alternate positions are the trombone's version of alternate fingerings, chosen to save slide travel.
The French horn adds one twist: two sets of tubing (F side and B♭ side) switched by a thumb trigger, so horn charts specify the side as well as the valves — on this site's horn pages, notes up to G4 use the F side and notes from A♭4 up use the B♭ side, the mainstream modern convention.
A sixty-second method for any new note
When you meet a note you don't know, read its chart in this order and it will never take longer than a minute. One: name the note and find its row. Two: set the left hand from the top group, then the right hand from the bottom group — hands in order, like the instrument. Three: check the corners: thumb, register key, pinkies — the symbols outside the grid are where mistakes hide. Four: play it, then check it against a tuner or a known-good recording; a fingering that produces the wrong pitch was misread somewhere, and the corners are the first suspects. Five: write the fingering, once, in your own hand in the music's margin if it keeps recurring — the act of drawing it is itself a memory aid, which is also why the blank worksheets in our printables section work as practice tools rather than mere tests.
You now know how every chart on this site is drawn — and, not coincidentally, how nearly every chart anywhere is drawn. The conventions are old, stable and shared, which is the quiet good news of this whole subject: learn to read one chart properly, and you have learned to read them all.