Fonts For Creating Musical Layouts

Constructing musical notation for layouts can be an arduous process, requiring plenty of planning and patience. Developers have come up with a number of dedicated visual and code-based applications for musical typesetting, but InDesign and Illustrator can also be used to produce a variety of musical layouts. Music-specific applications such as Finale and Sibelius include custom fonts. Some of those fonts are also usable in layout and word-processing programs, and there are other fonts designed just for use with applications like InDesign or Word. As you might expect, the character maps for some of these fonts are extensive, and essential to using these fonts, whether they offer fancy OpenType features or not. Some of these fonts do not come in OpenType versions, only TrueType or PostScript Type 1, but many of those are free, so that’s a trade-off you might want to consider.

Basic Notation Fonts

Sometimes you’ll only need to include some simple musical notation in a layout, especially if the project involves music education materials for beginning students. When that’s the case, consider these fonts.

Noto Music

OpenType Freeware fonts.google.com Noto Music is a part of the free

Noto font collection, designed by Google to include fonts for nearly all of the world’s writing systems. This font contains symbols for modern, Byzantine, and Greek musical notations. With 579 total glyphs, it has plenty of options for standard musical symbols, accidentals, dynamics, and other common notation elements. Noto Music, along with the other members of the Noto font family, were created to be visually consistent with each other. Its clean, well-defined glyphs make it suitable for digital and printed music applications.

MusiQwik and MusiSync

TrueType Freeware fontspace.com These fonts allow you to create notes and rhythms either with (MusiQwik) or without (MusiSync) staff lines. They are designed for “melodies” of single notes, but MusiQwik can be used to create multipart scores as long as each part consists of single notes, such as a standard SATB vocal score for four-part chorus (Figure 1).

These fonts are well suited to the tasks of generating music lessons, exercises, and simple melody charts. Although you cannot generate multi-note chords, this would be a good choice for instructional materials that can be created relatively quickly, or for examples within an article requiring only melody lines. A short video tutorial on using these fonts was created by a piano teacher, and shows the basics of typesetting with mapped characters, which should be no problem for experienced users of InDesign.

MusicEd and MusicEd Fingerings Fonts

TrueType $25 single user; multi-user licenses available musicteachertools.com The MusicEd© font is designed for creating basic musicianship materials with either noteheads or Kodály stick notation, simple worksheets, transparencies, and exams (Figure 2).

The MusicEd fingering fonts provide complete fingering for woodwinds and brass. These fonts will be very useful in creating method books, annotated editions of current works, and newly composed scores, which may require special fingerings (Figure 3).

Engraved Notation Fonts

If you need charts or samples with the look of high-quality plate printing, resembling traditionally typeset classical music scores, engraved notation fonts are your best bet. Most of them use advanced OpenType features to provide complex notations.

MusicPro

OpenType Single license: $39.95 p22.com MusicPro takes full advantage of OpenType features and contextual substitutions to produce a wide range of symbols and notations for Western music. Using stylistic sets, titling alternates, contextual alternates, and discretionary ligatures, you can add chords, contextual accidentals (sharps and flats), contextual key signatures, and time signatures to generate single- or double-staff musical notation (Figure 4).

Using stylistic sets can be challenging, as there are no default keyboard shortcuts for this. However, once you become familiar with common elements, switching sets gets easier. And the versatility of these extended character sets is worth the effort (Figure 5). This is a good font for professionals who need to create musical examples frequently, and who are comfortable with using advanced OpenType features.

Sonata (Adobe)

OpenType $29 for 5-seat license fontspring.com This font contains any character you could need for standard musical notation (Figure 6). As part of the Adobe font family, it’s been around since 1985 and has seen a lot of beneficial use. More than a dingbat font, it uses OpenType features to let you create complex musical notation.

Handwritten Fonts

Many professional musicians are familiar with handwritten scores/arrangements, which look more personalized than engraved scores. This is the look of the original jazz Real Books, which were transcribed and handwritten by students in the 1970s, and of many arrangements for musical theater shows.

Jazz and Swing Fonts

TrueType $19.95–$49.95 jazzfont.com Here are two full-featured font sets that include styles for notation, chord names, percussion notation, and text. They can be used with notation software such as Finale and Sibelius, as well as with InDesign. Jazz (Figure 7) has a more casual handwritten look, while Swing (Figure 8) resembles a more formal score, with a calligraphic feel. Both fonts provide a more personal look to scores and lead sheets than engraved typesets, while offering a complete range of standard notation and score markings.

NorScript (text only, no notation)

TrueType and PostScript Type 1 Individual font: $16.95 Full package of 7 fonts: $85.95 jazzfile.free.fr Sometimes you just need text that looks like it came from a well-known music book. These fonts replicate the handwritten text of the Real Books very accurately, but they contain no notation, so they would be applicable only to text-only layouts, not lead sheets or scores (Figure 9).

Specialized Notation and Chord Chart Fonts

If you’re venturing beyond the standard harmonic/melodic notation of basic Western music, these specialty fonts may come in very handy.

FretQwik

TrueType Freeware fontspace.com FretQwik is both an alphanumeric text font and guitar fret diagram builder. Half of the font consists of ordinary alphanumeric characters from a third-party publicly licensed font. The other half of the font has component symbols that can be pieced together to build nearly any standard guitar chord (6-string guitar, or 4-string ukulele or lute). Many guitarists don’t read standard notation, and easily-created chord symbols using this font are extremely useful. Given the popularity of guitar and, more recently, ukulele, this will be a useful tool for generating chord symbols to go with melody lines (Figure 10).

MICRO 3 (microtonal notation)

OpenType $25 mindeartheart.org Microtonality, in which notes are divided into small divisions, is more common in non-Western than in Western music. Most of those musical traditions have no notation systems whatsoever. Consequently, creating a font for standardized microtonal notation has been a difficult task. Ted Mook’s MICRO 3 (Figure 11) is designed for a 1/12th-tone notation system, in which the standard Western 12-tone octave is divided into 72 microtones. The visual quality of these characters would also be appropriate to lend interest to nonmusical layouts as well. To hear examples of microtonal music, check out the work of American pioneer Harry Partch, who built many microtonal instruments.

Coda

Using InDesign to generate musical scores of all types is a good and satisfying option, especially with the OpenType options available with some of these fonts. You won’t need to have a degree in orchestration to efficiently create clear, accurate music on the page as long as you know how to read a character map. Now, it’s time to head out for some live music!