I like to use a Socratic-ish method in my private lessons, and ask my students questions. It means that I have this conversation several times per day:
[Student plays.]
Me: How did that sound to you?
Student: Not good.
Me: What didn’t you like about it?
Student: It didn’t sound good.
Me: What aspect of it didn’t sound good to you? The tone? the pitch? the phrasing? the articulation?
Student: Um, I guess the articulation?
Me: What didn’t you like about the articulation?
Student: It wasn’t good?
It’s an ongoing battle to get my students to listen more deeply than that. Was the articulation “not good” because it started with air noise instead of tone? Because it was accompanied by an unwanted percussive sound? Was the articulation technique perfect but you failed to follow the composer’s markings? Or was it something else?
Often the “not good” is a combination of factors, but if my students can identify even one of them, then they can immediately start working in a focused way to improve it. If it’s just “not good,” then they tend to just play it again from the beginning without any clear approach to making it sound better, and repeat until frustrated.
Part of my job is to help them identify and verbalize the desirable and undesirable phenomena in their playing, and to teach them the techniques for manipulating the variables involved (breath support, voicing, embouchure, finger technique, and tongue technique, to name the most obvious ones). But it’s up to them to take that information and run with it. For my students to become independently-functional musicians, they need to learn to listen critically to themselves and troubleshoot.
For yourself and for your students, don’t be satisfied with bland value judgments (it sounded “good” or “bad”). Be factual and descriptive about what you hear, and tackle problems in a methodical way. Practice smart!
When I hear my students playing heavy, thumpy accents, I ask them how they are playing the accents. The answer is usually the same: “tongue harder?”
But when the tongue is properly understood to release the reed (or release the airstream on the flute), the idea of tonguing harder doesn’t make much sense. (How do you release harder?) Unfortunately, for many developing woodwind players, it translates to a larger area of contact between the tongue and the reed, causing unwanted percussive sounds.
Accents are better understood as what they appear to be on the page: small decrescendos. An accent is a note shape: louder at the beginning, softer at the end. It is produced by the mechanisms of volume/dynamics, not the tongue. Often, but not always, the note starts louder than the baseline dynamic level and decrescendos back to it.
As with most aspects of musical interpretation, this leaves a great deal of room for variation; accents can have many characters and shades. But none of those should include thuds or thumps (unless, I suppose, called for by the composer). Practice beautiful and stylish accents by slowing down the music enough to give each accented note a graceful decrescendo.
Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, at no cost to you.
Every so often I hear from people about what I call the E-flat contrabass clarinet (or “contrabass clarinet in E-flat”), such as in my woodwind doubling in musicals list or in my woodwind methods book. Some prefer the term “contra-alto” or even “contralto,” but I find “contrabass” to be the most accurate and useful description of the instrument.
(One disadvantage of this terminology is always having to specify the key to differentiate it from the larger contrabass in B-flat.)
First, let’s dispense with “contralto,” which describes a low female voice, typically in an opera setting. That misses the mark by a wide margin for an instrument whose range dips considerably lower than the lowest male voices.
The use of “contra-alto” (with or without hyphen) seems to be based on the questionable idea that the prefix “contra-” means “an octave below.” My best guess is that this is a back-formation from the names of some other instruments, such as the contrabassoon (which happens to be pitched an octave lower than the bassoon). In any case, following this logic leads to the term “contra-alto” clarinet because it is pitched an octave below the alto clarinet (an instrument whose waning popularity makes it a questionable choice for a frame of reference). This logic then produces “contrabass” for the B-flat instrument, as it is pitched an octave below the bass clarinet.
Various music dictionaries that I have at hand agree that the prefix “contra-” means “lower than,” but do not specify an octave lower, and most use contralto voice as an example. (If you have a counterexample from a published, music-oriented reference, I am interested to hear about it.) Based on this, “contra-alto” seems inapt—a contra-alto/contralto instrument should be just lower than the alto, and higher than tenor or bass.
Problematically, of the three major current manufacturers, Buffet-Crampon and Leblanc list “contra alto” clarinets on their websites, and Selmer uses “contralto.”
Here are some published usages of various names, listed from oldest to newest. Send me others if you know of any. It does seem to me that “contra-alto” becomes more common in the last quarter of the twentieth century, a trend that I consider undesirable (cf. “flautist”).
The author makes a case that the instrument would be better called an E♭ bass clarinet (and the bass clarinet would be better called a baritone clarinet).
The author allows that it is “sometimes called the ‘contra-alto’ clarinet.”
Page, Janet K., K. A. Gourlay, Roger Blench, and Nicholas Shackleton. “Clarinet.” The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Edited by Stanley Sadie and J. Tyrrell. London: Macmillan, 2001.
Randel, Don Michael, ed. “Clarinet.” The Harvard Dictionary of Music. 4th ed. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press, 2003.
Contra alto clarinet in E♭
Payne, Tim. “The Contrabass Clarinets.” In The Versatile Clarinet, edited by Roger Heaton. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Recently I discussed the topic of clarinet “pinky” (little finger) fingerings with my woodwind methods class. With all that school band directors have on their plates, it’s not surprising that this topic doesn’t always get taught thoroughly to beginners. It can be a bit of a puzzle to a non-clarinetist, but the important concepts can be mastered with a minimum of effort if they are taught clearly.
This is an important thing for woodwind doublers to understand, too, since they may be bringing with them some fingering habits that worked well on their other instrument(s), but which may not apply to clarinet in the same way.
The following notes on the clarinet require use of a pinky key:
These notes require left hand pinky
These notes require right hand pinky
These notes use EITHER left or right hand pinky
Pinky keys are also used in the altissimo register, in resonance fingerings, and so forth, but for today we’ll focus on the notes in the chart. If you’re unfamiliar with the fingerings, check them out at the Woodwind Fingering Guide.
The crucial decision-making deals with the notes in the last row of the chart, which each have two fingering possibilities—one using the left pinky, and one using the right pinky. If your clarinet is in proper adjustment, there shouldn’t be a difference in tone or intonation between the two fingerings, as they open or close the same toneholes. (With a poorly-adjusted clarinet, it’s possible for, say, one fingering to open a certain pad wider than another pad, perhaps affecting pitch and tone.) So our only criterion will be ease and precision of fingering.
Consider this passage, and we will walk through a systematic thought process for selecting fingerings:
If you are getting less than 80% playable clarinet or saxophone reeds from the boxes you are currently buying, buy different ones.
Be realistic about strengths. If you are only getting 2-3 good reeds out of a box, you aren’t just being “choosy.” You are probably playing on reeds that are too resistant, and those 2-3 are the softer ones. Let go of the nonsensical old myth that better players play stiffer reeds. If you are getting less than 80% “good” reeds from a box, try moving down (or, in rarer cases, up) a half strength.
Update your shopping list. There are many, many available reed options! Clarinet and saxophone players used to be stuck with the few brands available at nearby music stores. Now there are more brands, shipped anywhere in the world, probably for cheaper than buying at your local store. Don’t let a misplaced sense of brand loyalty or tradition keep you putting good money into bad reeds.
Skip the sandpaper, mostly. If you are buying reeds that actually work for you, you won’t have to do more than a few minutes’ worth of adjustment over the reed’s useful lifetime. The available variety of cuts and profiles is staggering. And modern reed companies can shape reed vamps with very good consistency and accuracy.
A brand that genuinely makes clarinet or saxophone reeds with less than 80% success doesn’t deserve your repeat business. But there’s a strong chance you have simply mismatched the reeds to your mouthpiece and playing requirements. Keep searching!
If you are nerdy/awesome enough to be into (1) the pedagogy of Irish traditional woodwind playing and (2) open-source text-based music notation software, then you may want to check out my set of symbols for Lilypond, based on the excellent ornamentation system by Grey Larsen. You can get the .ily file on GitHub (and submit your pull requests to make improvements to my code).
Cuts, strikes, slides, rolls, cranns, etc.
If you are unfamiliar with Mr. Larsen’s system and you play pennywhistles or wooden flutes, then really I must insist that you buy a copy of his The Essential Guide to Irish Flute and Tin Whistleimmediately—his ornamentation system is clear and logical and should be regarded as the standard for teaching and learning Irish-traditional ornamentation for wind instruments.
If you are unfamiliar with Lilypond, chances are good that you won’t like it even though it’s free and produces much better notation than the software you already spent several hundred dollars on.
Also, it’s worth noting that Chris Throup already had a similar idea a few years ago. Mine is a bit more complete, but his is really simple.
I often see poor hand position among developing saxophonists. It’s not as much of a problem for oboists, clarinetists, or bassoonists, since those instruments’ finger holes demand a higher degree of finger-placement precision in order to close them properly; an open-holed flute also requires a little more care. But the saxophone’s toneholes are all covered by pads affixed to relatively large keys, so even with a casual approach to hand position getting the holes covered isn’t a serious problem.
But there are a number of advantages to more careful hand positioning, and on a well-designed instrument it’s also really easy: just put the tips of the three middle fingers of each hand on the corresponding key touchpieces. (Not the tippy-tips, like a violinist, with the fingers perpendicular to the key surface, but the fleshy pad or “pulp” of the finger, just to the palm side of the tippy-tip.)
Let’s look at the left hand first. I have superimposed (poorly) the key touches over my fingers to show their locations.
Good hand positionPoor hand position
Here are the problems that the poor hand position causes:
In order to fully depress the keys, the fingers may lock straight or even collapse backwards a bit. This makes the fingers’ motion more complicated and tense, and less efficient.
The fingers may contact the keys farther down the finger pad, perhaps even at or below the first knuckle crease. This decreases control over the keys. And/or…
The pads of the fingers contact the keys somewhere beyond the key touchpieces, giving the fingers less leverage and requiring more effort to depress the keys.
The pinky finger is shifted to a position where it is more difficult to reach the low C-sharp key, and where more effort is required to fully depress it.
Although not pictured here, the thumb should also be situated to that its pad contacts the octave key in a strong position with good leverage.
Now the right hand.
Good hand positionPoor hand position
If poor right hand position is used:
As with the left hand, the fingers lose their neutral curve and become unnecessarily straightened.
As with the left hand, the contact points between the fingers and keys are less than optimal.
The pinky finger is shifted into a position where either the finger must be contorted to contact the E-flat key properly, or a less-optimal part of the finger contacts the key.
The ring finger must bend uncomfortably to reach the side F-sharp key, or that key must be pressed by stiffening the finger and contacting the key near the base of the finger, which is imprecise and awkward.
Sometimes poor right-hand position results from allowing the crook of the thumb and index finger to sit in the thumb hook. In these cases, good hand position will require repositioning the thumb so that the thumb’s distal joint is in the thumb hook.
Some of my students, when asked to shift their hand position, have initially objected, insisting that their poor hand position is required due to their individual anatomy or the configuration of their individual saxophones. I have yet to see this prove true. I suppose I can’t eliminate the possibility that very rare situations exist that might call for a slight adjustment to the finger-pads-on-the-touchpieces positioning, but I haven’t encountered a significant case of this yet. Even with my larger-than-average hands (you may be able to spot my custom extra-high green palm key touchpieces in the photos), putting my fingertips on the touchpieces immediately creates an open, relaxed, and efficient hand position, with fast finger movement and a light touch on the keys. If your saxophone has badly-positioned touchpieces, you might consider visiting a good repair technician to have them relocated (or consider it a warning sign of a poorly-made instrument that should be replaced).
Good hand position is a prerequisite to smooth, effortless saxophone technique. Check yours carefully, and set yourself up for success.
