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Re: Altissimo E

Author: mrn
Date: 2010-06-28 21:12

This note does tend to be a bit unstable as compared to the notes around it.

I use William's fingering quite a bit, although as Ken suggests, it can actually work "TOO well," depending on the context.

When I need the sound of the standard E fingering and need to jump up to it from the register below, I typically half-hole the LH1 finger hole. It only takes a small amount of opening on that hole to make the E come out. In fact, that's the problem with E6--that first finger hole is really too big to be acoustically optimal. Of course, once you've got the note to speak, you can lift your LH index finger up all the way--you don't have to continue to half-hole.

I thought I'd share a couple of other nifty E6 fingerings I use occasionally. I don't use them a ton, but when I do, they make a huge difference.

One of these is simply to overblow the "pinch Bb"--in other words, you just press the LH A key and the register key. This lets you play E6 without changing registers. Now most "overblown" fingerings like this (such as the infamous "open D") don't sound too great--they're out of tune or tonally deficient or both and usually only good for very rapid passages where you can't tell the difference. But this one (at least for me) sounds surprisingly good, so it's great for passages where you have to jump to the altissimo and back on the same note.

Another fingering I sometimes use is one I discovered accidentally one day--it came out of a fingering "mistake" I made when learning the Poulenc Sonata that didn't sound like a mistake (it was the right pitch, after all), so it got incorporated into my muscle memory. It wasn't until much later that I realized I was using a fingering I had never seen before!

Turns out it was a more stable fingering than the usual E6. It goes like this:

RT o x x (C#/G# key) | x o , o (Ab/Eb key)

See what I did--I played the F6 and Eb6 fingerings simultaneously!