Author: Ken Shaw ★2017
Date: 2007-12-29 20:03
There are many threads on playing Eb. Here's some of what I wrote several years ago:
I played Eb in the University of Tennessee Band and the Knoxville symphony many years ago (jumping up, if you can believe it, from contrabass in the West Point Band).
Mouthpieces can be a problem, particularly with school instruments. I'd advise getting your own Eb mouthpiece. Machine-made mouthpieces (Vandoren, Selmer, etc.) can be decent, but can also be awful, since too few are sold for the companies to keep their machinery in adjustment. It's far better to get one from a Woodwind.org Sponsor -- Fobes, Grabner, Lomax, etc. -- which will be hand-finished and will give you at least a chance of getting out what the instrument has to offer. Remember that you'll keep this mouthpiece forever, and you'll always be able to play Eb, so get as good as you can afford.
I played a Leblanc LL Eb, on which the high B-C-C#-D were, like yours, very sharp. The reason was that the barrel was far too short to be in tune. I went to a hardware store, got some washers for a garden hose and filed and sanded them down to fit in the top and bottom barrel sockets, adding maybe 6 mm. to the barrel length. I also enlarged the interior of each washer to match the bore, using sandpaper wrapped around a short length of dowel. It took a little over an hour, but if you can adjust reeds, you can do this, too. The extra length brought the instrument nicely in tune. You'll need a piece of fairly coarse sandpaper -- such as 40 or 60 grit -- and a short piece of dowel (just a few inches long).
In the end, though, you need to sit in a practice room with a tuner, finding how to play in tune.
You'll be tempted to use harder reeds than on Bb, but you should go at most one strength up. The rest is embouchure and support.
Since the Eb is on top of the texture, your intonation has to be really precise, and Eb often needs special fingerings. Pete Hadcock, the Boston Symphony Eb player, wrote an invaluable book on Eb, with many alternate fingerings, and another on orchestral playing, which you can get from Gary van Cott, items C036 and C043. Find them by searching on the word Hadcock at http://www.vcisinc.com/search/.
In a band, you're not a soloist when you play Eb. The concertmaster is still the 1st chair Bb player. It's very easy to shriek and squeal on Eb. Instead, you have to play softer than you think. You're there to add sparkle to the basic clarinet section sound. Listen hard to the 1st clarinets and blend in with them.
In the Mahler 1st, though, you ARE the soloist. Mahler was very sensitive to instrumental color and wrote specifically for clarinets in Eb, C, Bb and A to get their particular colors. Those little solos are written for Eb because Mahler WANTED them to be bright and "pecky." They're bird calls -- like sparks, or an electronic flash. Therefore, you don't want to sound like you're playing Bb clarinet. Your job is to bring out the squeakiness, not cover it up.
Have fun, and let us know how the concert goes.
Ken Shaw
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