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When I went to my very first teacher, Wilfred Kealey, he started to talk to me about music, and suggested ways of thinking which weren't directly related to the instrument, or even to the details of what I myself did. One thing which stuck in my mind was that I should imagine the clarinet sound as a smooth, round tube, which should begin deep inside me and stretch out through, and beyond, the bell of the instrument. It was my first encounter with a playing metaphor…In this chapter I will use this 'tube of sound' as a sort of reference. It divides up naturally into a number of bits, beginning with the abdomen/diaphragm system, proceeding to the space inside the mouth and throat, then the embouchure, and finally the physical instrument itself. I want to look at some aspects of each of these bits in turn…

[But] although there seems to be a sequence, in the sense that the later bits wouldn't work without the earlier ones, it is a mistake to think that it is a sequence like an assembly line, in which some product undergoes independent processes at a number of different points and emerges complete at the end. When we play a note, all the bits are interacting with each other in a complicated way, so we shall need to remember that simply considering them in order may be misleading. This is particularly true when we talk about the sound of the clarinet.

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One of the consequences of thinking of the sound of the clarinet as a smooth tube passing down the instrument may be that we are led always to associate a strong sound with a strong flow of air. This association, whilst useful in some ways, can create problems. We can begin to want the experience of pushing lots of air through the instrument in loud passages, and perhaps start to use reeds that are too stiff.

A more useful metaphor is to think of the tube of air vibrating rather like the string on a 'cello.

The fact is that the sound of the instrument is made by the vibrations of the air column; and the air is already inside the instrument -- we don't have to put it there. Some extra air obviously does pass down the instrument, but this is incidental. If the reed's motion were to be driven by some other means than blowing, we would still obtain a sound from the tube.

If we think about the matter in this way, we can see that we may indeed on some occasions be putting more air down the instrument than we need. It is not always the case that a large quantity of air is necessary to produce the most powerful, effective, or resonant sound. What IS required is to have the most efficient coupling possible between the reed and the air-tube, and to allow the instrument and the reed to vibrate together.

To succeed in this requires that there is sufficient air pressure to set the reed vibrating, and will also certainly have to do with precise details of the embouchure. The idea of the delicate control of a freely vibrating object (the reed), already co-operating with the resonance of the vibrating air inside the instrument, is a pleasing one, and it is also a mental image almost guaranteed to have the effect of avoiding an unduly tight or restrictive embouchure.

The shape of the inside of our mouth is not often thought of as having a strong effect on the sound of the clarinet. But though pressure waves inside the mouth are not audible in themselves, they clearly have some effect on how the reed behaves, just like the waves in the instrument, and therefore they indirectly make a contribution to the sound of the clarinet. Strong evidence in this direction is that in special circumstances we can completely change the 'normal' behaviour of the clarinet: simply by altering the position of the tongue we can glissando down from the one-thumb plus register key C” through a sixth or more. Mouth shapes control intonation [and sound quality] in other parts of the instrument too, provided the reed is sufficiently responsive.