For this concert coming up, w/ piano four hands plus vocal quartet, I'm playing primo on one set and secondo on the other, which is an interesting exercise in whether I'm worse at reading extreme numbers of ledger lines in treble or bass clef
I think I'm worse at bass because I have less practice; a lot of the time when there's a super low bass note it's just an octave doubling of something more reasonable, so I never have to decipher it independently.
Also, it's easier to guess what a super-low LH note must be, given what's going on in the RH, than vice versa. (Most of my reading is sight-reading so this matters to me!)
When I really think about it, 8va is liberally used for high stuff and rarely for low stuff, so in practice most of the bad ledger line reading ends up being in the secondo part.
Sadly these are just dumb annotations on a PDF ... no actual data involved! I would love to do real research on fingering, though. I've kicked the idea around for 20 years without ever knowing exactly what I would want to do.
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