Do woodwind instruments have similar fingerings?

ByBret Pimentel

I get lots of emails and search traffic from people trying to find the answer to questions about woodwinds and “similar” fingerings: Do they use the same or similar fingerings? Which instruments are the most similar? Can I use fingerings from _____ instrument on _____ instrument?

I’ve addressed before why these questions might be coming from misconceptions about woodwind doubling, and why the answers might not be as useful as one might think. But beyond that, some of those questions are difficult to answer in a straightforward way.

Do any of the major modern Western woodwind instrument families use identical fingerings (such as saxophones using the same fingerings as oboes, or clarinets using the same fingerings as bassoons)? No.

Do instruments within those families use identical fingerings? Kind of. For example, the members of the concert flute family (piccolo, flute, alto and bass flutes, and others), use fingerings that are at least very similar. But some use slightly-varied fingerings to improve pitch, tone, or response of certain notes: for example, piccolo players often use a modified fingering for the third-octave A-flat, which they wouldn’t use on a lower-pitched flute. And the keys that appear on flutes aren’t set in stone—some might have a special C-sharp trill key, or a low B key, that other flutes lack. And clever flute makers can add anything else they dream up that customers will pay for.

Do any of the woodwind families have similar enough fingerings that you can play them without significant additional effort to learn how? No, not if you want to play them well.

But really, which ones are the most similar? It’s not as simple as counting up the number of “matching” fingerings between two instruments. You could argue that the written note D below the treble clef staff is “similar” for flute, oboe, and saxophone. D uses the three middle fingers of each hand on each of these instruments. But the flute also requires pressing a left-hand thumb key, while the others don’t. And the oboe has more than one key for the right ring finger, and I suppose it’s up to you whether the correct one for this note feels the “same” to you as the other two instruments. On clarinet, this written note uses a very different fingering, but the note written an octave higher has similarities to the flute/oboe/saxophone note. And the bassoon doesn’t have a D fingered in a closely similar way, but its low G uses a similar fingering that falls into roughly analogous scale fingering patterns.

(While brainstorming this post, I briefly considered trying to create some kind of chart showing which fingerings were the “same” or “similar” across the woodwind families. I quickly abandoned the idea because the necessary exceptions, explanations, and context would have complicated it beyond any usefulness.)

Like asking if two languages are similar, asking if two instruments’ fingerings are similar begs an answer that is incomplete, misleading, and ultimately not useful. If your intention is to apply that answer to playing or teaching woodwind instruments, your success will depend on instead approaching each instrument on its own terms.

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  • Q&A: Woodwind doubling advice

    ByBret Pimentel

    A couple of weeks ago I put out a call for questions, in honor of today being the fifteenth anniversary of this blog. A bunch of the questions boiled down to: what advice do you have on woodwind doubling? Here are a few answers:

    • Be a beginner on each instrument. Take the time to work through beginner materials (starting probably with pages of whole notes!), scales, and so forth. Resist the temptation to dive in on advanced or even intermediate repertoire.

    • Get comfortable with a long timeline. You can’t reach the highest levels of playing on a bunch of instruments in the same time that your peers are reaching the highest levels on single instruments, unless you’re a lot more talented than me. And you can’t afford to buy a section’s worth of top-quality instruments in that same time frame, either, unless you’re a lot richer than me.

    • Prioritize what motivates you. Lots of aspiring doublers seem very concerned about what instrument they “should” learn next. There’s no roadmap, and it’s hard to predict what gigs might come your way in the future. So you might as well devote your time, effort, and money to whichever instrument you feel most excited about adding to your collection.

    • Be skeptical of instruments, accessories, method books, etc. that are marketed as “for doublers.” If you want to play clarinet like a clarinetist, use what the clarinetists use.

    Some other readers asked about the “secrets” to practicing multiple instruments.

    As far as I know there aren’t any; if you want to play three or five instruments well, plan to put in three or five times as many hours. I’ve posted previously about an approach to an instrument rotation for practicing, but it really depends on you particular set of instruments, abilities, and goals.

    Another reader asked how hard it was for me to learn secondary instruments.

    Beyond general musicianship skills (like reading music or blending into an ensemble), I don’t think there’s a lot of useful cross-training effect. In other words, no instrument is a good shortcut to learning another, at least not learning it well. But I do think there are underlying concepts that can be useful for thinking of the woodwind family and its techniques as part of a unified whole. (I address those concepts in my book Woodwind Basics, or sprinkled throughout the last 15 years of blog posts.)

    Someone else asked about when to get serious about woodwind doubling (high school? undergraduate studies? graduate school?), which is something I’ve opined about previously.

    Everyone’s circumstances are different, but for my undergraduate music majors (and for me when I was in that stage) there are a couple of things that need to happen in their development: gain a certain level of mastery at operating the instrument itself, and develop a certain maturity of musicianship. While these things should be in development concurrently, achieving the first is ultimately a prerequisite to achieving the second. (You can’t fully execute a mature musical idea if you’re held back by technical deficiencies.) I think it can be a fun side pursuit to pick up an additional instrument or two in high school or college, but I think many people won’t be ready to pursue professional-level playing on multiple instruments until graduate school, and then won’t achieve it within the time frame of a graduate degree.

    Another reader asked questions about pursuing a career in playing in musical theater orchestras: is it worthwhile to go on to graduate school? How do you get more gigs (cold-call theaters? take lessons with Broadway players)?

    Graduate degrees (or any degrees) aren’t necessary for just about any kind of gig work, although they can provide useful training to improve your skills, gain some experience, and network with fellow musicians.

    I would say don’t call theaters. Venues are unlikely to hire musicians directly. Instead, you want to connect with the musical directors or contractors who are likely hiring the orchestra members. Direct outreach to those folks might be effective in some cases. But a lot of musical directors, if they call their usual players and find them unavailable, will ask them for recommendations, so the musicians already playing the gigs you want are both your competition and your best chances at getting hired. Taking lessons is a possible way to get a foot in the door. Sometimes just catching them after a show, introducing yourself, complimenting their playing, and handing over a business card can be enough to get you on their radar.

    Additionally, a career exclusively playing musicals would be an oddity. Most woodwind players who do musicals do lots of kinds of gigs. Develop your skills, build your network, and see what possibilities come your way.

    Someone else asked a question about the history of multiple woodwinds degree programs.

    This isn’t something I have dug into enough to answer with any confidence, but it would make a nice thesis or dissertation for someone working on a multiple woodwinds graduate degree. I do know that I’ve heard lots of folks confidently make conflicting claims about which degree programs were first or biggest or best, or about how the number or configuration or quality of degree programs has changed.

    Thanks for the thoughtful questions!

  • Woodwind technique and conservation of energy

    ByBret Pimentel

    That people prefer to move in energetically optimal ways has been established for decades and now represents a central principle of movement science. … Energy optimization may also occur over the course of a lifetime, as years of experience could allow people to learn the optimal way to move in familiar situations and allow training to tune physiology to be more economical. An additional hypothesis—one that underpins many modern theories of motor control—is that people can adjust their movements to continuously optimize energetic cost.

    Selinger, Jessica C., Shawn M. O’Connor, Jeremy D. Wong, and J. Maxwell Donelan. “Humans can continuously optimize energetic cost during walking.” Current Biology 25, no. 18 (2015): 2452-2456.

    I certainly see this phenomenon in my own woodwind playing and teaching. How many times have you encountered these?

    • More resistant notes failing to respond because there’s just enough breath support for the less-resistant ones

    • Embouchures losing their shape, reverting to a neutral/normal mouth position

    • Voicing, such as the high, cold-air voicing needed for clarinet playing, or the low, warm-air one for flutes and double reeds, lapsing into a medium, luke-warm state that negatively affects tone, pitch, and response

    • Pitch sagging at ends of notes as breath support peters out

    These are often addressed by teachers as “habits,” which may be true, but they may also be fed by the brain’s capacity—and priority—to micro-optimize our muscle use to conserve energy. No wonder they are difficult to overcome! Patience and persistence are necessary to train our bodies to put the right amount of effort into playing our instruments.

    A factor in this is establishing a suitably high bar for success. For a beginner, the only question might be, “did a sound come out?” For a slightly more advanced student, it might become, “did the correct approximate pitch come out?” A more advanced player might examine the precision of the pitch, the quality of the tone, and the immediacy of the response, among many other factors. It takes a relatively low amount of energy to meet the beginner’s threshold of success, but potentially much more for the advanced player’s.

    Additionally, this intentional use of greater energy resources must be managed carefully to avoid its misapplication, which can result in excessive tension.

    I find that when I am playing at my best balance of efficiency and effort, an hour of playing a woodwind instrument leaves me feeling like I have done some light exercise; I’ll feel the mild and pleasant fatigue of having taken a walk or reorganized a bookshelf. Serious tiredness or soreness are warnings that I’m overusing my body. (Your results may vary depending on your physical capabilities.)

    Be in tune with your own body as you play, and teach your students to be in tune with theirs, so that you’re in the sweet spot of working hard enough but not harder.

  • Reader email: doubling opportunities

    ByBret Pimentel
    woodwinds
    Photo, fantail media

    A reader emailed me to ask this question (edited):

    I was wondering if you could give me some information on what kind of opportunities being a doubler has opened up for you. I am beginning to consider options for graduate school and am looking into multiple woodwinds degrees. Thanks!

    I do consider myself to be at the beginning of a hopefully long career, but doubling has already given me some opportunities that I surely wouldn’t have had otherwise.

    Doubling isn’t a career that typically leads to fame outside the music business, but within the industry many of the best and best-known doublers are working in Broadway pit orchestras, in the Los Angeles recording studios, or on the road with touring jazz or pop acts.

    I haven’t had any of those jobs, nor do I anticipate pursuing any of them at this point. But here are a few things doubling has done for me:

    Doubling gigs. These are gigs where I am actually hired to perform on multiple instruments. Most reasonably large cities in the US seem to have at least a few community or school musical theater productions with large enough budgets to pay a professional or semi-pro orchestra, and woodwind doublers are generally in demand (bonus points for double reed players or “low reeds” players). Doubling gigs can also include being hired as a local to play behind a touring show or artist who is passing through town, or being a sort of utility woodwind player for local orchestras, churches, and so forth. Often for me these have been sort of write-your-own-job-description situations, where I’m hired to play one instrument, and later re-hired because I’m able and willing to cover some other parts, too. Read More “Reader email: doubling opportunities”

  • Observing woodwind playing objectively

    ByBret Pimentel

    If you are teaching a woodwind methods course, you might be interested in my book.

    I have my woodwind methods classes do a lot of observing of woodwind playing. They comment on each other’s woodwind playing in class, write concert/recital reports, and make written comments on each other’s playing exams (for my eyes only). This is a crucial skill for their future teaching careers.

    I try to push them to keep their observations objective. But often the comments are things like:

    • “Your tone sounds really good.”
    • “Your articulation was sluggish.”
    • “So-so finger fluency.”

    Remarks like this, especially if detached from technique observations or recommendations, are unhelpful but often also unfounded. “Good” tone is a difficult thing to pin down, even for a specialist in the instrument. Even my college woodwind-instrument majors usually haven’t done enough critical listening in their lifetime for me to fully trust their judgments of what tone is “good,” even on their own instrument.

    I find it more helpful to the development of my students’ disciplined, precise teaching to hold them to a standard of objectivity. Tone isn’t inherently “good” or “bad.” (It might be more possible to effectively use a standard like “characteristic,” but even that requires some context.) But it’s fairly straightforward, and more useful pedagogically, to determine whether tone is, say, consistent.

    Some better versions of the above observations might be:

    • “Your tone is consistent from note to note, and also seems characteristic of the instrument.”
    • “I hear a moment of air noise before each note, especially in the low register. Try increasing breath support to help each note respond immediately.”
    • “Your fingers seem to move quickly and confidently to most notes, but you seem to arrive late at the F-sharps. Let’s review that fingering.”

    Keeping observations factual and non-judgmental makes lessons more efficient and targeted, and keeps lines of communication open for better teaching and learning.

  • |

    Woodwind Doubler Census results, part 2: instruments

    ByBret Pimentel

    In the previous installment of results from the Great Woodwind Doubler Census of 2011, I shared some basic demographic information about the 187 survey respondents. In this installment (and those to come), we’ll dig into some real doubling stuff.

    Instruments

    Q: Which woodwind instruments do you play, and at what levels?

    The top results are unsurprising: saxophone, clarinet, and flute being the most widely-played, with oboe in a distant fourth place. I was a little surprised to see folk/ethnic/period woodwinds edge out the bassoon.
    Read More “Woodwind Doubler Census results, part 2: instruments”

  • Don’t say this to your beginning oboists

    ByBret Pimentel

    Here is a version of a handout I provided recently to graduate students at the American Band College, a summer program for school band directors.

    Band directors, don’t say this to your beginning oboists:

    • “Shh.” As a university oboe teacher, I routinely meet young oboists who play like they are terrified of making a sound. They often report that in their school band experience, every time they play the director gives them “the hand.” Playing softly on the oboe (or any woodwind) is an advanced technique. If you possibly can, encourage your beginning oboists to make big, resonant, confident sounds. Defend them from classmates who compare them unfavorably to waterfowl. It will pay off when you have a rock-star oboe soloist, with a glorious, ringing sound, for your high school wind ensemble.
    • “The oboe is really hard.” There’s a pointless myth that the oboe is at or near the top of the list of “hardest” instruments. Like any instrument, it has its own learning curve. But it’s quite manageable for a motivated student. Don’t give them unnecessary reasons to stress over it.
    • “Take this fingering chart home and figure it out.” Of course ideally all your students would be taking private lessons, right? But the oboe has a few unique quirks, like its fussy and delicate reeds, that really heighten the need for some specialist instruction. If you possibly can, get your beginning oboists in touch with qualified private teachers ASAP.
    • “Lip it up.” “Tighten your embouchure.” This is bad advice for any woodwind instrument. It’s a band-aid solution for flat pitch, buzzy tone, or squeaks. A good oboe embouchure is almost no embouchure at all—the lips remain pretty close to a neutral, non-oboe-playing position. (Do allow the corners of the mouth to come inward, and the lipstick part of the lips to roll in over the reed a bit.) Solve pitch, tone, and response problems with a relaxed, light embouchure, powerful breath support, correct voicing (low, “oh” vowel, warm air), and good reeds (preferably handmade and/or adjusted by the student’s private oboe teacher).
    • “Check out this oboe player on YouTube.” Listening and watching is a good thing, for sure. But be cautious about who you recommend: there are various “schools” of oboe playing in different parts of the world, that value different tone ideals and use differing posture, embouchure, and reeds. Generally the American-school players value a silky-smooth, relatively dark tone, and use a posture that keeps the oboe at around a 45° angle to the body. If you hear a livelier, brighter tone and see a more trumpet-like instrument position, that may not be the model you want for your young American oboists. (All the regional oboe sounds are lovely and valid, but oboe sounds from other locales should be presented with some context.)
    • “You can’t march it.” You’re absolutely right that oboes do not belong on the marching field, and your oboists should find some other way to get involved. But please encourage the oboe as a worthwhile pursuit for young musicians. It has a noble history and repertoire, is sought-after by university music department scholarship committees, and will bring something special to your concert ensembles.

3 Comments

  1. Brilliant article………………I was always under the misconception that the recorder and bagpipes were same fingering, I was looking for an instrument that has same fingering as a recorder but has a much nicer tone

    Reply

  2. I was wondering more about saxophone and clarinet. Yes, there are many different keys of Sam’s, so let’s just say alto sax to clarinet.

    Reply

    1. I started with bflat clarinet and played for about 4 years. I had really wanted to learn saxophone, and found out my school had some loaner instruments and my band instructor told me that he wasn’t able to give me lessons, but that if I could master the fingerings on my own or with private lessons, he had no issues with me trying out sax. I started with an alto sax and found that there was if memory serves me only one maybe 2 fingerings that were different. It’s been 35 years since I last played and due to nerve damage can no longer play either of them. I think it was g or c that was different… on clarinet you closed the first hole with your left index finger, but on sax, you would close the second hole using your middle finger also on the left hand. Beyond that slight difference, everything else was the same, and I had zero issues switching between instruments. By the end of the first semester, I had gotten good enough on sax that I was again in either first or second seat of alto sax players. I had been first or second seat in clarinet for years. I also played tenor sax, tenor clarinet, and tried baritone sax, but it was too heavy for me and very uncomfortable to play. I ended up being a bit of a floater in the school band, and would play whatever clarinet or sax my teacher needed most for a piece of music, but he respected the idea that sax was my first love in re to instruments and primarily had me playing alto or tenor sax with a side of bflat or or tenor clarinet. I went from clarinet to sax with no issues and considering the minimal differences in fingering, I think it’s would be easy to go from sax to clarinet, but the sax player may struggle slightly with ensuring they have a good seal on the holes on the clarinet since with sax most of the holes are covered with keys and the clarinet has open holes for the majority of fingerings otherwise I think it would be very easy to start with sax and switch to clarinet, as I described I played whatever was needed and switching back and forth really wasn’t all that challenging.

      Reply

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