Woodwind doubling and “similar” fingerings

ByBret Pimentel
Photo, thorinside

Some of the questions I am most frequently asked about woodwind doubling involve the similarities in fingerings between the instruments:

  • “You play all those instruments? Well, I guess the fingerings must be pretty much the same, right?”
  • “I play the oboe, and I would like to learn the saxophone. How close are the fingerings?”

There are, in my opinion, two misconceptions at work here:

  1. Fingerings are the biggest hurdle to switching instruments.
  2. Similar fingerings are a good thing.

In my experience, neither of these is true.

Memorizing, habituating, and internalizing fingerings for a new instrument isn’t exactly a weekend project, but it is fairly straightforward. Carefully practicing full-range scales and arpeggios with a good fingering chart will go a long way. To me, the subtleties of tone production (response, intonation, and tone quality) are a much greater challenge, and require deeper, longer-term study. They are also less suited to a do-it-yourself approach, really requiring the attuned ear, years of experience, and diagnostic skills of a good teacher.

On the second point, I don’t really find “similar” fingerings to be a significant advantage when switching instruments. Identical fingerings may simplify the process somewhat, but just kind-of-the-same fingerings introduce potential for confusion.

Suppose, for example, that, like many doublers, you started as a saxophonist and later added flute and clarinet. You might have found that the lowest-octave D major scale fingerings are very similar for saxophone and flute—so similar, in fact, that you can probably get away with using saxophone fingerings on the flute, and produce a mediocre but recognizable scale. You might ignore the pinky D-sharp key, use middle-finger F-sharp, and neglect to lift the left index finger for fourth-line D. This will still approximate a D scale, but with sacrifices to pitch, tone, and response. A new doubler might fall into the trap of habituating these compromised fingerings, and blaming deficiencies on equipment or embouchure.

With the clarinet, the fingerings for a lowest-octave D scale are significantly different, which forces the doubler to really learn the fingerings from scratch rather than falling back on close-enough saxophone fingerings.

Be conscientious and detailed about developing finger technique on each one of your instruments. No shortcuts!

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    Planning breaths

    ByBret Pimentel

    Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, at no cost to you.

    When learning a new étude or repertoire piece, it’s common to practice at first with focus on the notes, often playing them at a slow tempo and/or divided into chunks. This is a good approach for mastering the needed finger technique, but it may neglect one of the crucial parts of a performance: breathing.

    In some music, it’s obvious where to breathe. But in a page of nonstop sixteenth notes, it’s harder to find the right places, and to execute them gracefully. Adding to the problem, I find that when I am nervous or playing under pressure, my breathing is one of the first things that falls apart: I start breathing in unaccustomed places, or skipping breaths that I know I really need.

    I recommend establishing a breathing plan early in the process of learning new music. That way you can practice the breaths just like you practice the notes—they become a part of your muscle memory, and will happen automatically even under pressure.

    The first step for a wind player should be to mark in the musical breaths, the ones that demarcate phrases. These are breaths that you will take (or possibly fake) regardless of your need for oxygen, because they serve the music. How exactly to do that is beyond the scope of this post, but here are a few quick tips:

    • Beware breathing at bar lines. They look like nice stopping points, but often don’t make musical sense. (They are there only for your convenience in counting.)
    • Background in music theory helps a lot, but you can also use your ears to help you figure out intuitively where a phrase comes to rest, or steal ideas from a good recording.
    • To go deeper, consider studying phrasing, perhaps from a book like David McGill’s. (Put that one on your wish list if you haven’t read it already!)

    Once the breaths required by the music are in place, you may decide you need more, perhaps because you haven’t worked the piece up to its full tempo yet (or because the piece isn’t written with sensitivity to your desire to survive). Mark in-between “survival” breaths as needed, perhaps in parentheses so you remember which ones they are. Put them in the best places you can find, and execute them as musically as you can, but as your tempo increases you may be able to skip them. If so, be sure to erase them so your marked-in plan stays up to date.

    Choosing places for survival breaths is a trial-and-error process. Mark some in and give them a try, then adjust as needed. If you feel uncomfortable while playing, this can lead to panicked decisions on stage, so choose breaths for your comfort.

    Particularly for the oboe, you may find you need some “breaths” where you can actually exhale stale air. Mark these clearly, too.

    Always update your pencil marks if you decide to change the plan at all, so that your plan is 100% clear and you can practice it in a consistent way. You can change your mind later, as long as you change your marks.

    To summarize:

    • Start early in the process of learning a new piece.
    • Mark in musical breaths, which you will observe even if you’re capable of playing longer without stopping.
    • Mark in survival breaths, if necessary. Use trial and error to get them right.
    • Practice the breaths just as diligently as you practice the notes.
    • As you get closer to the performance, you might alter the breathing plan as your interpretation evolves, or as you no longer need some of the survival breaths.
    • Be strict about keeping the markings current, and about playing just what is marked.

    Well-planned, thoroughly-practiced breaths contribute to a relaxed, musical performance.

  • Pushing in and pulling out

    ByBret Pimentel

    As a follow-up to last month’s post on playing in tune, I would like to revisit the idea of adjusting woodwind tuning mechanisms (generally by the “pushing in” or “pulling out” of some joint of the instrument). Note that this information is probably of most value to advanced players; beginning and intermediate players should be focusing their intonation efforts on breath support and voicing.

    A simplistic view of “tuning” is that “pulling out” makes the instrument play a little flatter and “pushing in” makes it play a little sharper. The problem is that not all notes are affected equally.

    For example, let’s keep the math simple and imagine an instrument that is 100cm long with its tuning mechanism pushed all the way in. And let’s imagine that instrument has a tonehole that can be opened to give the tube an effective length of 50cm.

    tuning_percent_before

    Now suppose that you pull the tuning mechanism out by 1cm. The lengths of the tube for the notes are now 101cm and 51cm.

    tuning_percent_after

    They have changed by the same absolute length, but not by the same percentage. The shorter-tube notes (those with more open toneholes) are more dramatically affected by changes in the tuning mechanism than the long-tube notes are.

    This is a problem without a tidy solution. A high-quality instrument is built to play at a specific pitch standard (A=440, A=442, etc.) with the tuning mechanism adjusted to a precise location and at a specific temperature. The “easiest” way to play in tune is to own an instrument built to your preferred pitch standard (such as the one your ensemble tunes to), play only in spaces having a suitable temperature, and adjust the tuning mechanism to that precise spot every time. In reality, of course, we need the flexibility of a moveable tuning mechanism to adapt to a variety of circumstances, but we have to be aware of the consequences of pushing in and pulling out.

    An additional wrinkle, so to speak, is that adjusting tuning mechanisms can introduce perturbations to the instrument’s bore. Skilled instrument makers can purposefully create perturbations to improve an instrument’s intonation, but undesirable perturbations can have non-intuitive effects on the instrument’s scale.

    Here’s what I mean by the tuning mechanism creating a perturbation. Notice how when the tuning mechanism is pushed in the bore is a consistent width, but when the tuning mechanism is pulled out, there is a wider spot in the bore:

    perturbation

    This is one of the benefits of tuning a clarinet or bassoon flatter by switching to a longer barrel or bocal: you get the additional length you need without creating a bore perturbation (though remember, notes are still affected unequally). A workaround for clarinetists is to use tuning rings, preferably matched to the instrument’s bore size at that joint, to fill in the perturbation.

    Most of getting tuned up has to do with obtaining a high-quality instrument and playing it with high-quality basic technique (good breath support, voicing, and embouchure). That last little bit of improvement is complex and elusive, and understanding some of the reasons for that can help you get there.

  • The difference between “student” and “professional” instruments

    ByBret Pimentel

    Visit a music store or an instrument maker’s website and you will frequently see band instruments sorted into categories like “student,” “intermediate/step-up,” and “professional.” It’s important to understand that these distinctions are not bound to any specific criteria, and not policed by any governing body. The labels have a lot to do with target market, and not much to do with the instruments’ actual playing characteristics.

    For example, I often have prospective college music majors proudly show me their “professional” clarinets, a specific model that a local retailer labels as such even though very few professional players would find the instrument to their liking. These students will, in most cases, have to purchase another, more expensive instrument to meet the demands of college-level playing.

    On the other hand, some of my college students have instruments that are positioned by the maker as lesser than the maker’s more premium line, but which are popular and well-regarded among professional musicians.

    “Student” instruments are rarely better for students, mostly just less expensive—made more cheaply or with fewer features. In most cases, if money were no object, I think it would be an advantage for a beginner to start on a high-quality (“professional”) instrument. Sometimes “student” instruments are designed to be more comfortable for smaller players, which of course doesn’t necessarily correspond to quality requirements.

    Labeling instruments as “intermediate” or “step-up” is another exercise in creative writing. In my experience, these are rarely worth it—they tend to cost nearly as much as “professional” instruments but play only slightly better than “student” ones.

    There are a very few other designations that have specific meanings. For example, the term “full conservatory” for oboes is widely accepted as meaning the instrument has certain required keys and mechanisms on it. However, an oboe maker or retailer can label any oboe as “full conservatory” without any formal consequence. (My nearest retailer does this exact thing.) Many makers sell “modified conservatory” oboes, which has no specific meaning—it’s just aimed at people who can’t afford “full conservatory” but like to believe they have gotten some version thereof.

    If you are a student (including a college student) or are purchasing an instrument for one, you should ideally do so with significant input from your teacher. And if you are a professional, you should prioritize carefully which features and qualities are most important, regardless of labels.

  • Pedagogical recipes

    ByBret Pimentel

    I want to follow up on something I touched on in my last post. I described in that post how I had my woodwind methods class evaluate some online pedagogical resources, and mentioned that I had them compare the information found online to the information presented in class. My idea was to prepare them to deal with conflicting information, which will be part of their reality as public school band directors.

    Woodwind pedagogy, unfortunately, is a mishmash of contradictory ideas. This is supported by a culture of hero worship of certain teachers and performers, a permissive editorial process for publishing pedagogical materials (increasingly so with the rise of the internet), and an attitude that music is not subject to scientific method.

    When conflicts exist between one school of thought and another, in some cases that is because one or both sides is incorrect. In other cases the problem is a communication failure: both sides are applying the same techniques in the same way, but describing them poorly (or at least differently). But I think there are other cases where the difference can be attributed to what I think of as different “recipes.”

    photo, Sarah Horrigan
    photo, Sarah Horrigan

    There are many ways to make a chocolate cake. Some cake recipes might be objectively better than others by some measure or another. Some might produce results that are generally satisfactory but especially suited to certain tastes. And in some cases, two different recipes might produce results that are very similar. In those cases, the way the ingredients and techniques balance is significant: one recipe might call for two eggs instead of three, but has more of another ingredient that makes up the difference, or a difference in baking time and temperature.

    I think a similar thing can happen with “recipes” for woodwind playing. Equipment preferences are a fairly clear example: one clarinet teacher might favor very stiff reeds, while another prefers softer ones. Both might produce excellent results, so long as they are balanced properly—the first teacher probably balances stiffer reeds against mouthpieces with a more closed tip, and the other might use softer reeds with more open mouthpieces. One oboe teacher might clip his reeds to 70mm while another clips hers to 69.5mm, but they probably balance this with narrower or wider shaper tips, or tweaks to any of a dozen other variables.

    Playing techniques are a little more abstract and complicated to separate out, but I think the same concept applies. One bassoon teacher might encourage some jaw movement when articulating lower notes, while another teaches a more stable embouchure, but it’s always more complicated than that: the technique’s usefulness and effectiveness has to be evaluated in the context of each teacher’s approach to breath support, voicing, embouchure, equipment, and more.

    The idea that I wanted to bring across to my class is that, for band directors or other musicians and music educators who might not be specialists in each of the woodwind instruments, it is important to beware little pedagogical proverbs taken out of context. Something like “firm up your embouchure” or “use a stiffer reed” or “use the alternate F-sharp” can seem like a quick and digestible solution, but can’t be applied casually and without understanding of the larger picture.

  • Novelty and solo multiple-woodwind performance

    ByBret Pimentel

    For a decade now, virtually every solo recital I have played has involved multiple woodwind instruments. I enjoy the variety and the challenge, and audiences are always duly appreciative and complimentary.

    However, I do wonder sometimes about the novelty aspect of using multiple woodwind instruments in solo “classical” performance. Often well-intentioned (and much-appreciated!) audience members will tell me something like, “It’s so amazing that you can play all those instruments!” That’s nice of them, but would they say something similar at a single-instrument recital? “It’s so amazing that you can play that instrument.”

    Photo, José Camba
    Photo, José Camba

    I’ve leveraged the variety a couple of times recently to do composer-themed recitals, one of music by Debussy and one of music by Telemann. On a single instrument, I would mostly shy away from playing an hour of music by a single composer. Such a thing could be done, but to make it a real success would require both a very engaging performer and an appropriate audience: for listeners with a casual appreciation of classical music, an hour of Bach flute sonatas or an hour of Brahms clarinet sonatas could be a bit of a drag. My recent Telemann sonata included music performed on six different solo instruments, two of them relatively rarely-heard (recorder and EWI), and that seemed to be enough to keep the audience on board.

    But were they on board purely because of the composer’s and performers’ art, or was it the feat of instrumental derring-do that held their interest? Of course I would like for my performances to stand on their own, regardless of how many or how few instruments I use, but it’s hard to tell when the audience is distracted by the parade of shiny objects. I’m not bothered by having a gimmick per se, but I don’t want it to be the only thing holding the performance together.

  • Woodwind trill technique

    ByBret Pimentel

    Ideally, a trill is done with one finger, and preferably a finger that is nimble and independent, like an index or middle finger:

    flute bassoon clarinet

    In many cases that isn’t possible. When two fingers (or more!) are needed, it’s best if they can be fingers of the same hand, moving in the same direction (moving down onto keys/holes simultaneously).

    flute clarinet saxophone

    If the most obvious trill fingering involves more than one finger, try moving them each individually and see if you can produce something that works. If the pitch of the trilled note isn’t quite right, many woodwind players lean toward a sharper upper note rather than a flatter one.

    There are good fingering charts available online and in print that offer possible trill fingerings for when common/standard/obvious fingerings don’t work. If you find you need to invent a fingering, a good starting point is to finger the lower note on your instrument, and see what holes there are that you could open with a finger or two to possibly produce the upper note. Try each of them, and some combinations, until hopefully you find one that produces the right pitch. If you have a good understanding of your instrument’s registers, you may also find that you can borrow fingerings for one or both notes from other registers.

    Sometimes the tone, pitch, or response of the trill fingering isn’t good when you sustain it as an individual note, but will work acceptably in the context of a trill.

    The two notes of the trill should be about equally balanced, so that if you were to record it and slow it down you would hear that the individual notes of the trill are equal in duration and volume. Trills should also fit volume-wise into the context of the musical phrase; use strong and consistent breath support, as though you were playing a single long note.

    Trill speed is an artistic decision. Generally trills should be fast enough to give the impression of an effect applied to a single note, rather than a sequence of separate notes. They usually shouldn’t be so fast as to sound jarring or unnatural. The speed of the trill can change for musical effect, and when it does it usually starts slower and accelerates. The best way to learn appropriate trill speeds is by listening to great performances and recordings.

2 Comments

  1. I agree wholeheartedly! As a multiple woodwind player I am frequently asked these same questions, even by some of my professors. The bottom line is a clarinet is a clarinet and I am a clarinetist when I am playing the clarinet. Likewise, a bassoon is a bassoon and I am a bassoonist when I am playing the bassoon. The same goes for flute and saxophone or whatever else comes my way.
    The goal is to never ever think of similarities between fingering systems, even though it may be tempting when just learning a new woodwind. Thinking that way creates confusion (in addition to knowing the fingerings, now you have to know the similarities as well…yikes!) and creates a mindset that you are, for example, a saxophonist playing clarinet. The moment you think that is the moment that you are not a clarinetist and bam! you are a “doubler,” which is exactly what professional multiple woodwind players are not.

    Reply

  2. Good points!

    I usually respond that it amounts to learning how the new instrument works. All the things you know about music, breath support, etc. still apply. It is about learning the mechanics of the new instrument, which includes fingerings, but also embouchure, hand position, how much/little breath support to use, etc.

    And woodwinds are all more similar to one another than to, say, brass instruments. I don’t play any brass (that’s always a fun one, too, because a lot of people think a saxophone, made of brass, must be a brass instrument), not because I couldn’t if I wanted to, but because there’s a lot more of a learning curve there than for a woodwind instrument. My brass-playing sons can pick up a different brass instrument pretty quickly, but fumble with woodwinds like I do with brass.

    Reply

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