The Clarinet BBoard

The Clarinet BBoard The C4 standard

New Topic | Go to Top | Go to Topic | Search | Help/Rules | Smileys/Notes | Log In

Previous Message | Next Message

Re: Why transposing instruments?

Author: clarnibass
Date: 2017-12-10 09:00

>> You simply learn to finger them differently <<

It's not simply at all

>> The convenience of calling seven fingers down “C” pales in comparison to all the difficulty it causes. <<

It's a matter of perspective. Coming from the point of view of both writing music and playing clarinet, to me it's exactly the opposite. Simply writing notes at different locations on the paper and understanding the transposition is extremely easy compared with every clarinet player having to learn different fingerings for different clarinets.

With computer programs now it's almost ridiculous to compare, but I used to write by hand on paper and it's just so much easier to write transposed parts than learning new fingerings as a player. That's even with modern clarinets.

I play pretty much only Bb clarinets so it wouldn't really affect me. I prefer to take the very slight hassle of writing transposed parts than put the huge effort on others to learn different fingerings.

I was surprised to learn some instruments (e.g. tuba) have different fingerings instead of transpositions. Makes much less sense IMO.

I know a couple of players who learned Bb instruments (clarinet and trumpet) as C (non-transposed) instruments. They only play by ear, or play their own music, so they never need to read regular parts written for those instruments. They never play any other clarinets or trumpets transposed differently either.

Reply To Message | Avail. Forums | Flat View

Newer Topic | Older Topic

Topics

Author

Date

Why transposing instruments? new

Matt74

2017-12-09 23:07