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Contents
Tone holes - too far away and to wide for fingertips Why does the tone become higher when opening a tone hole? Clarinets must have more tone holes than other wind instruments Play higher registers: Overblowing with the speaker hole Play half tones by forking Lowering tones by "covering" Play half tones with additional tone holes Open and closed keys Requirements keys must meet Key development in history Modern tone holes: No simple drill job Key materials Pads Springs Key differences Boehm vs German Keys and accoustics Some thoughts about optimal keys
Tone holes - some are too far away and too wide for fingertips
The smaller members of the clarinet family, the E-flat and the B-flat, do have simple tone holes that you can close with your finger tips, much like a recorder. But even with the smaller instrument types the lowest holes - that are way down - cannot be closed with your fingertips only. The larger the instrument, the further away the tone holes. And you will see that tone holes for lower tones are wider than your fingertips, which is acustically helpful. In modern clarinets, some of the key mechanics are designed to close tone holes at places where a finger couldn't go easily. You want to have the tone holes at the optimal position rather than drilling them where they can be used based an average player's anatomy. Optimal positions would be a straight line down facing the audience, including the thumb-operated speaker key, a hole that usually faces the player.
covered. The moment that one tone hole is opened (and if it is wide enough to let most of the swinging air column stream out of the instrument's body), the length of the swinging air column is reduced to roughly the distance between the reed's tip and the tone hole. So - simplified - when you open a sufficiently large tone hole this means nearly the same as reducing the instruments overall length.
Clarinets have to have more tone holes than other wind instruments
In order to understand the tone holes and keys of a clarinet, let us at first take a look at the much simpler design of the soprano recorder, that has no keys at all and (usually) eight tone holes. Many people have learnt to play this simple wind instrument as first instrument in school. Of the eight tone holes seven are on the front and one - the speaker hole or octave hole - is on the back where you have your left thumb. With this instrument you can play all notes of an octave. The lowest not - C - sounds, when you blow into the mouthpiece with all holes are closed. When opening one tone hole after the other starting from the bottom one you have a scale in C: C - D - E - F - G - A - H (or B-sharp) or in romanic cultures: Do - Re - Mi - Fa - So - La - Si.
Scale on simple recorders - for better instruments fingering may be different! Seven tone holes at the front - the octave- or speaker-hole is the circle at the side. Black = closed / white = opened / half = half opened In some countries the "H" is called "B-sharp"
You can play the high c and d via "forked fingering", this will be explained below.
ordinary tone hole. Recorder players reach that by half-covering the hole. What it does acustically is "destroying" the lowest frequency of the flute sound, and only the overtones (octaves and multiples) remain, resulting in the higher tones. These were present in the low register, too, but not so dominant (see overtones). As said above: If the overblowing hole was too wide, the swinging air column would exit the instrument here as it would with every other tone hole, and this very high tone would remain, independently of what holes below were closed or opened. Therefore the overblow- or speakerhole is very narrow (clarinet, oboe) or you only open it half (recorder). The switch into the octave when opening the overblowing hole is the same not only for recorders, but all other wood wind instruments like saxophones, bassoons oboes. The clarinet is the exception to the rule: It has got an overblow hole much like all other woodwinds, and it works the same way, but when opening this hole, the frequency is not doubled, but it becomes 2.5 fold. In notes on a scale, this is not the 8th, but the 12th note (because doubling means the 8th note on a scale, 2.5 - which is doubling plus a half is 8 plus 8/2 = 8 + 4 = 12). In Latin this is called duodecime: octava means 8th, duodecima (~dozen) means 12 . Above I have mentioned that opening the overblowing-hole the lowest frequency, that is the one that we hear conciously, is destroyed, while the next higher strong frequency can now be heard prominently (and all others remain intact as well). The sound of an instrument or voice does not only consist of one frequency, but a row; which are connected in a mathematical relation; usually - with recorders, oboes, saxophones and most other wind instruments like 1 : 2 : 4 etc. - this are even numbered relations. But with a clarinet - for acoustical reasons - the relations of the sound waves produced are different, they create waves in relations like 1 : 3 : 5 and so on, so they are odd numbers. Mathematically 8 : 12 is the same as 2 : 3. So now when you use the fingering for a C and open the overblowing hole on a clarinet, what you hear is not a high c, but a g. So far so bad. A scale and a fingering chart for a clarinet now looks like this:
simple clarinet without holes for half-tones In some countries the "H" is called "B-sharp"
In practical life this means: The most simple clarinet with tone holes for just a scale in the key of C with no #-sharps or b-flats needs more tone holes than a recorder, because where the recorder already plays the eigth note of the scale with the fingering for the first; the clarinet needs additional tone holes for the note 8, 9, 10 and 11. So you need at least 10 tone holes plus an overblowing hole; adds up to 11 holes. And in real life you need at least one finger (usually the right hand's thumb) to hold the instrument, even when it is placed on the ground like a bass clarinet. That means you only have 9 fingers to operate 11 holes. In result that means in order to build a clarinet, you need at least two keys. That is what you find at the first clarinets: Zwei Klappen, a long one for the lowest note, and an overblowing or speaker key. Because we have to operate the instrument and its 11 holes with 9 fingers, some fingers have to do doulbe function jobs.
If you now want to play a G-flat - which is half a tone lower than G, you use the fingering for G and close the tone hole not one below, but two below, leaving the hole one below G open. This results in a quite well tuned G-flat. Why is that - and why does this not produce a mixture between a bad G and an E, as you might have expected? The swinging air column now exits out of the open (forked) tone hole, in our case the F-hole, but only partly. Below the tone hole but still within the bore it continues to swing, but now we have an air column consisting of two parts, that is related via a knot, just behind the opened tone hole. The lower (smaller) part continues down to the D-hole. Physically speaking this is being added to the existing column for about half the distance between forked hole and open hole. That produced that surprisingly well tuned G-flat. Now forked fingering works only as long as the forked hole is not too wide, very much like the overblowing hole. Otherwise the air column would be exiting the instrumen fully and we would
have a badly sounding (too low) F. In order to prevent that, players sometimes half-cover the forked holes, or the designer has build special ring keys for this purpose.
Adding the overblow hole, you can forget wanting to close all those holes with fingers only! Even my simple student model soprano clarinet (German model) only the speaker key had no key. And then it has got a lot of resonance- and improvement keys. Between 22 and 28 keys are standard for the German system, the Boehm has got some 20 keys and 5 rings.
tone holes can be closed perfectly: When closed a key must not let any air escape the instruments body through the tone hole tone holes are fully open and impose no acoustical impedance for the streaming air, this is achieved by chosing the largest possible diameter of the tone hole (and the key); plaus the key must go up at least a third of the tone hole's diameter. If the lowest key that is actually open is not far away enough from the tone holes surface, then the tone will not sound well or even be significantly to low. This is the same as the covering technique desricbed above. opening and closing of keys must be quick - that is especially critical in the case of the open keys - the ones that are opend by pressing with a finger and closed by a spring pressing the pad back onto the hole. The force of the spring must be sufficient to work quickly and there must be no friction in the bearing.
And then, too, keys must not click, squeak - they should always work completely silent. All this can be achieved rather well using modern keys and frequently maintaining them.
Early keys were far from perfect and simply a prolongation for the fingers to reach holes too far away; they were metal levers with a piece of felt glued to a square end. This type of key was - of
course - never perfectly tight, and obviously only worked when the felt was damp. A key with a flat pad made it necessary to sand the surface around the key hole flat, and those tone holes were relatively small. The first major step which made the modern clarinet possible was the invention by instrument builder Iwan Mller who invented the "salt-spoon-key". In connection with the sunk in key hole the new key could close holes nearly perfectly. His design is the one we still use today. We will look at the improvements in detail below.
The second essential improvement was the ring key by Klos. A "ring" is a key with an opening shown on the photo next to the forefinger. With a ring key you can close holes that are in reach of your fingers but since this enhances the diameter of your fingers, the holes can be drilled to the acoustically optimal size (which you could not close with fingers alone). After this there came numerous steps that you can sum up as mechanical connections between keys that make trills and jumps possible that otherwise would have been very difficult or impossible. However, the key mechanic also adapted to the habit: For example one still grips forks while the key mechanic turns this into an acoustically better result.
You hardly find any tone holes in your clarinet that are similar to the ones of a recorder - on the picture left it is the upper tone hole. These are the ones that you have to cover with fingertips, All other tone holes, that are covered by keys with pads, look differently: They are sunk-in, that is: they are in a bowl-shaped indention and the hole itself is surrounded by a ring-shaped border with a sharp edge. The lower tone hole on the picture is one like that. Sunk-in tone holes are necessary, because the surface of the simple tone hole is not flat but bent - like the surface of the clarinet's body. With a flat pad you cannot close a tone hole that is the
result of a simple drill job. Producing a perfectly fitting bent pad that has exactly the shape of the clarinet's body would be possible today, but still a sunk in hole would be much better for use and makes the key maintenance simpler. The most simple and practical solution was to make the surface around the tone hole flat - that is, what Denner and other early instrument makers did. You can see it on the picture of the ancient key above. But to close a tone hole with a leather pad, a ring-shaped border around the hole is suited much better than a flat surface: The sharp edge will press into the soft surface, making it fit even better. The key with the soft leather pad will close the tone hole even if the pad is not aligned perfectly. In order not to carve out too much material, the instrument maker only sinks in a flat bowl-shaped area around the tone hole (about 2 mm or 1/10 inch).
Key materials
In general the metal parts of the key system consist of German silver cast parts. That is a copperbased alloy. When long turning keys are made, steel tubes are soldered onto the keys, usually using silver lead. Really expensive instruments have forged keys which are less prone to breaking than cast keys (and then again hand-forged are better than drop-forged, where a huge weight falls onto the metal to forge it into form). Since all these metals can be soldered with silver lead, they can be repaired easily. Most clarinet's metal parts are silver-plated, some are nickelplated or gilded. This is done in electroplating baths. The coating materials have pros and cons:
Silver - the most common - looks nice, but may tarnish, primarily in contact with sweat Nickel doesn't tarnish, is durable, glides well, is cheap, but unfortunately Nickel can trigger allergies (this is quite frequent - so you better keep your hands off Nickel!) Gold does neither tarnish, is good for gliding, but expensive and looks unusual (could be problematic in case a uniform look of instruments is favorable, because there are frequent TV performances ;-)
Pads
Clarinet pads are traditionally made of leather, felt and cardbord, but today you find silikon (the elastic material), too, sometimes cork and more recently other synthetical material.
Leather pads
Leather pads have dominated for hundreds of years, and are still more practical than most other types. They are made of a round cardboard plate as base (in the picture the cardboard is the bottom part) and a felt plate (in the middle) of the same size. Over that the manufacturer fixes a thin, soft leather coating. Originally that was a fish skin (flutes still use that). The leather is usually died white for clarinets, and is golden brown for saxophone pads. That type of pad can be bought in all sizes even in not so specialised music shops - they are the same for clarinets, saxophones and oboes. What matters is the strength and even more the diameter. Leather pads do have advantages: They work well, they are usually tight, and they tolerate slight imperfections of the key because - when becoming wet - they will adapt to the tone hole again. The sharp ringshaped border of the sunk in hole will press in into the soft moist leather. Leather pads are easy to fix onto the keys and they can be removed as easily. You use seal wax (the traditional way) or hot-melt glue for this. You find a "how to" under Repair / First Aid. The main problem is that slowly start to sound bad when getting too old - the leather then gets brittle. Then, at the latest, you have to change the pad or have them changed. The more frequent a leather pad gets wet, the sooner this will happen. That means that the pads high up on the clarinet usually have to be replaced more often than the ones down that hardly ever will need that. As a rule of thumb it is good to have your instrument maintained once a year if you play much (like 5 - 10 hours a week) or every second year if you play less; and that is when the upper pads should be replaced.
Silicone pads
Today you will find a lot of pads are made from elastic silicone, similar to what is used to glue tubes to your bathtub or sticks sheet glass together as an aquarium. Silicon has got advantages: It can be brought into every form, is elastic and does not change under humidity. It will last and stay in form forever (that is: longer than your clarinet's body) - so it never will have to be changed. The advantage is a disadvantage at the same time: It will not change its form; so if the key is bent a bid, then the pad will not be placed perfectly over the tone hole and will fail to close the hole. Sometimes it will still do as long as its surface is still wet, but when it dries a bit, it will no more. A
leather pad would adapt itself and you wouldn't even notice. Some musicians think that the tone will be influenced negatively - but serious tests have found out that in the long run the majority of listeners will prefer the sound of a clarinet with silicone pads to one with leather pads (except when the leather pads are new, not much older than a couple of months - since they do degrade quickly). Besides issues with bent keys there are two more disadvantages that silicon pads have:
since silicon does not stick to most materials after it has "hardened" you can not easily glue a pad that has fallen out back into place, especially not if this happens just before a concerto. You can, too, glue in special silicon pads with thermo glue - so we can expect to see this become more frequent. Another solution are silicone pads that have a base made of a different material, onto which the glue is then applied, which will make standard procedures the same as with leather pads. since silicon does not absorb water, the quantity of water on the clarinet's wooden corpus that is covered by the pad can not evaporate except through the wood. That is it will stay there for a long time. That may cause serious problems for the tone hole if you store your instrument away without having wiped it out fully.
Cork pads
Cork pads are still used where a leather pad would be unpractical - and where you expect a lot of moisture like the duodezime-key on the bass clarinet. Cork is not bad as pad material, easy to repair, easy to handle, but it is not fully elastic - slowly but surely the material becomes and remains compressed. It probably will be fully replaced with silicon in the future.
Innovative pads
Most of the new developments like the silicium resonance pad are acustically superior to most pads that exist today except for new leather pads. But they require extremely precise keys that must not bend easily (because the pads are neither very elastic nor do they adapt) and they need sharp and precisely inlet key holes. This is not always given with your standard clarinet today (except for very expensive models).
Springs
All keys use springs, either to open the key and keep the key open when not pressed or to close it when released - depending on the function of the key. They come in two technical types: the sheet spring and the needle spring.
The sheet spring is most widely used with flip keys. It consists of a flat sheet of hardened spring steel, that is screwed against a key. The other end usually presses against the instrument's body.
Needle springs, are most often used to turn a key on an axis. The needle is fixed to a column and presses against a hook soldered to the key. They actually used to be made of sewing needles. Both types work fine, are simple and robust and can be adjusted with simple tools like a screwdriver and pliers. If you bend the spring further in the direction it presses, the power of the spring increases. If you bend it into the other direction the power is reduced. This can be done a couple of times, anyway, be careful not to break the spring - even if you can replace the needle by an ordinary needle from a sewing set, you will have a hard time finding a fitting one, you can't bend it into form easily and then you won't be able to fix it in the column without help of an experienced instrument maker (let alone the sheet spring - you won't find that in hardware stores...)
German / Boehm
There are some more and some less obvious differences between Boehm clarinets and the German system. This chapter discusses only the key and mechanics aspects. You find a discussion of the systems as such here. Since you do not speak German (otherwise you should be reading theGerman version of this website) you are probably used to Boehm systems (except if you are living in an oriental or a Jazz culture, where an old-fashioned type of the German instrument is used). So what you know is the clarinet on the right. The most obvious different feature that you can even see from far away are four levers for the little finger on the lower joint of the Boehm instrument, whereas the German system has got two wide, silverplated flat fingerrests with Ebony rolls to slide forward and back. Another important difference in keys are the very long flip-keys that the German system has in the lower joint. They reach from top of the joint to the lowest key, and often even to a resonance pad on the bell. You operate them with your little finger of the left hand. The Boehm system has replaced those long keys by rotating tubes. That is a significant improvement, because if something breaks on a German clarinet, it is those long flip levers! Especially when building long levers the combination of needle spring and rotating tube is much more durable, makes less noises and needs less space. Furthermore it will be more reliable when playing. In order to avoid breakage some German instrument desingers combined a chain of flip
keys, again not so great, because they react sluggish because of the joints. A rotating tube of steel can be quite long and still works precisely. The latest German style designs replace the long flip keys by turning tubes, wherever possible, and that is especially true for the long keys that bass and contra bass clarinets use. The goal is to make it practical, fast, quiet, but conserve the traditional fingering as far as possible. The fingering that you use for Boehm instruments mostly avoids "gliding" of fingers from one key to another, especially that of the little finger (which is important for German instrument). Because Jazz players, Oriental and Klezmer players seem to prefer exactly that (it improves the sliding of notes, too) many have kept the traditional instrument and not switched to Boehm, although their classical neighbors have. Being German myself I have, of course, learnt to play the German system. Today I play a Boehm Bass Clarinet, and comparing the fingering, the Boehm system has got some more advantages than it has disadvantages. There are some more alternative fingerings for the same note, that means, some difficult parts (jumps and trills) can be played more easily, as well as a legato is easier. However, I would not recommend a German who is getting along well with the instrument to change to Boehm just for that reason. There might be one more point, here, too: For people with small hands and short fingers the Boehm system seems to be a bit easier to handle than the German system.
E Flat Clarinet
The A clarinet and the B flat clarinet are the "normal" clarinets. They are the ones that you usually think of when you talk about "the" clarinet. Sometimes this clarinet is referred to as "soprano clarinet" (which is correct, thinking of clarinets resembling the voices Bass, Alto and Soprano).
Of course one could - theoretically - transpose the notes, you probably would prefer to write the notes down. But in reality that turns out to become very difficult for the player, since most keys and a lot of jumps can't be executed so easily and as result the piece would sound much poorer than it would have to. If you plan to play the famous clarinet concerto in A by Mozart on a B flat clarinet, that will translate into B (Si) - which means five sharps (as opposed to none for the A clarinet).
Bassett Clarinet
Despite its name the modern Bassett Clarinet is not a Bassett Horn but rather a soprano A clarinet (very rarely a B flat) that was extended by about 18 cm towards the bell and four extra keys. That means the tone range is extended four half tones (E flat to C). So it becomes possible to play Mozart's clarinet concerto KV 622 in the original form without the transposed parts (the lowest notes were transposed up by an octave to play it on a standard A clarinet). Today's professionals use this instrument when performing the concerto, you can watch Sharon Kam on this YouTube Video . With some professional type clarinets (high end / high price) you can buy a longer lower part for the instrument and it fits out-of-the-box, otherwise you can have it made custom-built for your favourite instrument.
The alto-clarinet and the modern form of the bassett horn are looking very similar. They are low clarinets (in Eb or in F respectively). Today they have the characteristic bend in the barrel which is usually made from metal - and they usually show a metal funnel like a bass clarinet although
some do not; it seems that is more an esthetical feature. Due to the bends the clarinet can be built roughly the same hight as a Bb clarinet and it is usually played just held with your hands (and optionally with a neck strap), while bass clarinets do have a thorn to be placed on the ground (for holding, a wooden bass clarinet is too heavy).
Alto Clarinets
You find alto clarinets in harmony bands or symphonic bands, hardly ever in classical symphony orchestras. And there was only one classical composer who wrote for bassett horn at all; but this composer was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the bassett horn was his favorite instrument. Therefore alone it is very likely that this instrument will stay with us forever.
Bassett Horn
The famous clarinet concerto in A was - as far as we know today - originally composed for a bassett clarinet and not for the A clarinet. That instrument might have looked a little like the Bassetthorn, maybe without the funnel. Since such instruments don't exist any more, the musicians use an A clarinet and changed some of the lowest notes to be able to play that parts. There are original hand-written notes by Mozart and since he precisely knew the instruments and their tone range we can tell that something like this must have existed. Today there still are some very old bassett horns in museums (e.g. in Hamburg and Berlin seepicture) and they all do have the charakteristic bend and a box-like connecting piece (the "book") - and with some the bell looks like a french horn. This is probably the reason why it was named bassett "horn". The crooked form was due to the technical problems building long and still effective keys. The player had to reach and cover nearly all tone holes with his fingers - in Mozart's days the modern key was not yet invented.
Bassett Clarinet
The modern Bassett Clarinet is less a Bassett Horn but more an extended version of an A- or Bflat Soprano clarinet. Today professional clarinet players (like Sharon Kam and Sabine Meyer) use this type of instrument to play Mozart's famous concerto KV 622 in its original form.
clarinet in compositions for large scale ensembles, the symphonic band music and even in popular music. Because of its shape the bass clarinet is often confused with a saxophone although it is acustically rather a distant relative... nevertheless in the modern form it has got the same father with Adolphe Sax.
Should I buy a cheaper bass clarinet that goes down only to E flat?
Professional instruments today always go down to C (sounds as B flat). But there are bass clarinets that only reach down to E or E flat. They are a bit shorter, because the lower joint can be about 25 cm (about 10 inch) shorter, and have 4 keys less. That makes them considerably cheaper. The manufacturer will tell you that they are of the same excellent quality and that the four lowest tones will only appear - if at all - in newer pieces, where you can easily replace them by transposing an octave up. Yeah, sure. One point in playing the bass clarinet is the sound of the deepest register, and whenever composers in the last 50 years or so wrote a bass clarinet solo, you can bet it made use of the wide compass down to the deepest tones. There are not many solo parts in wind orchestras or symphonies for bass clarinets, and if they are there, you want to be sure you are not limited by your instrument. So if you can afford it at all, do not buy a short instrument!
The composer wants a deep C - your instrument can't play it - what do you do?
So now for one reason or another your bass clarinet only reaches Eb, but the melody goes down further. That is bad for you; but you have to decide what to do now:
leave it out: If the part is not crucial and the tone is not part of a melody or has to be there because it belongs to an accord - not playing this one note is a possible solution. Especially when bari-sax and tuba play the same note in ff, hardly anybody will notice. play the one note you haven't got exactly an octave higher - that is OK theoretically and in harmonics, but hardly ever sounds good, and definitely not if it is a part of an important melody. play the whole melody or phrase - at least a part of it - an octave higher: It is a better solution in the sense of melodical impression, but less satisfying in general sound; especially if you should be the only prominent bass instrument in that part, but you play a tenor voice instead. if you are good in harmonical theory and have a look at the score, maybe you can replace the missing tone by the quint (five notes above) or a terz (three above). But that only works depending on other harmonical lines around you.
If you have about 70 Euro to spare you can buy an excellent bass clarinet stand (the same stand as for bassoons, a heavy solid steel thing with a big rubber cup). You can leave the instrument there, and nobody will kick it over. You really need such a stand if the bass clarinet is one of two instruments you play in the same concerto, and you don't want to place the expensive instrument on the floor where somebody may step on it. The floor still is a safer place than putting the instrument on a chair. So, if you must, turn the mouthpiece of the instrument up (prevents breaking the reed), and put the bass clarinet onto its opened case on the floor in an open space where people can see it rather than putting it on a chair (NEVER do that!). You may as well find an empty corner where you can safely lean the bass clarinet into - but hurry, bassoonists and bassist and lots of other instrumentalists are looking for the same places! Beware: Do not try to lean your expensive instrument into a door frame of a door that may be opened from outside, even if it is locked at the moment!
Contra alto - and contra bass clarinet by Selmer, classical with wooden corpus, and modern, wound metal contra bass clarinet by Eppelsheimer - all Boehm systems
While contra bass and contra alt voices appear in compositions, the sub-contra-clarinet is rather experimental, and there are only few examples of it (personally I haven't seen one yet).