 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: ruben
Date: 2026-03-02 13:25
When I play -alone or with other people-I sound reasonably in tune to myself. When I hear a recording of myself, I sound too sharp. This must be some auditory, physical phenomenon that's at work. I suppose I should get used to sounding a little flat to myself when I play. Your thoughts on the matter please.
rubengreenbergparisfrance@gmail.com
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Author: Philip Caron
Date: 2026-03-02 16:12
Do you have perfect pitch? I ask because I wonder what your pitch reference is when you listen to a recording of yourself playing alone.
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Author: ruben
Date: 2026-03-02 19:55
Philp: My absolute pitch comes and goes. I think it is hard for us clarinetists to have absolute pitch because ours is a transposition instrument so we don't play the real notes. On the days when I do have absolute pitch, I notice I play better. It would seem to me that with age, we hear flatter for some reason and overcompensate by playing sharp.
rubengreenbergparisfrance@gmail.com
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Author: Philip Caron
Date: 2026-03-03 02:35
That hearing and pitch sense vary on different days is very believable.
Pianist Sviatoslav Richter complained that his absolute pitch shifted as he aged. I think his shifted upward, so he'd misidentify pitches or keys to be higher than they were. The change was why he started playing from scores later in life instead of relying on his phenomenal memory. Not sure if that's the same as what you describe, plus he had no control over the pitches his instrument made.
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Author: David Eichler
Date: 2026-03-04 04:09
The critical distinction is playing live versus listening to yourself on a recording. I wonder if your perception of overtones in those different situations has something to do with it.
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Author: paulyb
Date: 2026-03-04 11:06
Have you asked your playing colleagues whether they think you are playing sharp in a live situation? Does this happen when you play in unison with other instruments or only when you are playing individual harmony parts? Does it depend at all on the instruments involved (e.g. strings Vs wind; other clarinets; bassoon Vs flute etc)?
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Author: Luuk
Date: 2026-03-04 12:22
Yes, overtones, that is my idea too. Related story: once the (very experienced) conductor of our band had me play some notes to check my intonation with help of his tuner. He remarked: 'Strange, you sound flat but you are in tune'. I always thought this should have to do with my overtone spectrum differing from my colleagues at that time.
Regards,
Luuk
Philharmonie Brainport
The Netherlands
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Author: ruben
Date: 2026-03-04 13:21
Overtones: I must admit I never thought of that. A recording engineer once told me that the clarinet was especially hard to record because it has so many overtones. Also, in France, Italy, Spain...maybe other countries...you get used to playing at a pretty high pitch: officially A-442, but actually higher. Then when I play with Americans or Brits, I find it difficult to play at 440 because I've been conditioned to think and hear higher.
rubengreenbergparisfrance@gmail.com
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Author: graham
Date: 2026-03-04 19:15
Being sharp to other players would cause a modulating clash effect at least some of the time. The feeling of being either sharp or flat is (as already mentioned) associated with tone colour (in addition to actual pitch). Try cutting the treble on your recording playback (perhaps increase midrange) and see if the impression dissipates.
But if that fails, there’s the old saying: “it’s better to be sharp than out of tune.”
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Author: brycon
Date: 2026-03-05 02:32
Quote:
When I play -alone or with other people-I sound reasonably in tune to myself. When I hear a recording of myself, I sound too sharp. This must be some auditory, physical phenomenon that's at work. I suppose I should get used to sounding a little flat to myself when I play. Your thoughts on the matter please.
If I'm playing with piano or even a chamber piece, I'll usually record some of the rehearsals to check and see if what I'm hearing is what the recorder is hearing. I've found the perception of intonation can be greatly affected by balance: a chord being poorly voiced by the various players can make it sound out of tune even if everyone's actually in tune.
But I think you might be right about your sense of pitch drifting over time. About 10 years ago or so, James Galway came to my institution to play a Mozart concerto with the orchestra. To my ears, he was unbearably sharp. And, in rehearsals, he would ask about his pitch and get the feedback that he was sharp from others. Later, in a class, he said that, as he's aged, his absolute pitch has drifted. And to be in tune, he has to be below where his inner ear tells him he needs to be.
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Author: ruben
Date: 2026-03-05 11:11
brycon: Conclusion: don't ever get old! ha ha!
rubengreenbergparisfrance@gmail.com
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Author: kdk
Date: 2026-03-10 01:01
My feeling (I am not an acoustician or a recording engineer) has always been that mics and whatever is processing their output do not "hear" the same balance of overtones that live human ears do. This is a phenomenon that I don't find is limited to a player's hearing *himself* differently on the recording than he thought it sounded live. Excellent players whom I have heard live often sound sharp on the recording of the very same performance.
I studied with Anthony Gigliotti for several years. I truly loved his playing - tone and intonation - most of the time I heard him in the Academy of Music. Some of his recordings make me cringe. The difference between a strong, consistent, centered sound in the concert hall and the thin, sharp sound I sometimes heard in the broadcast recording several weeks later was striking. Maybe it was the difference between the Friday night when they recorded the concert and the Saturday night when I heard it in the Academy. But it happened often enough to make me strongly suspect that my ears and the recording equipment were responding to different stimuli.
Karl
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Author: ruben
Date: 2026-03-10 11:02
Karl: For some reason (overtones?), some great players don't sound as good on recordings as in person: Gigliotti and Drucker both sounded shrill on recordings. Leister sounded exactly the same. Here, we are talking of tone and not intonation.
rubengreenbergparisfrance@gmail.com
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Author: kdk
Date: 2026-03-11 00:28
ruben wrote:
> Here, we are talking of tone and not intonation.
Well, to some extent I think they may be related. The harmonic series is not equally tempered. Some partials are not in tune as we would expect to hear them in an equally tempered scale or chord. I suspect (again, I'm not an acoustical engineer) that if certain untempered harmonics are emphasized in the recording process that we don't hear in the same proportion listening to the sound live, we may actually hear the recorded sound implying a pitch that the live sound did not.
I have heard some god-awfully-out-of-tune clarinet playing in some of the early NY Metropolitan recordings I've listened to (one recording of Beethoven's 9th comes to mind - I don't remember what clarinetist was credited). I'm not willing to believe that players that far out of tune (and thin sounding) would have made it through an audition. To my ears some of those recordings you mention of Drucker and Gigliotti sound screamingly sharp. Having heard each live, I am certain they weren't as out of tune as those recordings imply. I have a couple of Leopold Wlach recordings that feature intonation that is truly cringeworthy. I never heard him play live, but I can't imagine he actually played that way. There are lots of other examples in my library of recordings like these. If the clarinet playing had been truly so sharp (or sometimes flat), they would have at least considered a new take if time had permitted.
But, my intuition tells me that apparent pitch problems can be introduced in the recording process that are a direct result of imperfect fidelity in the recording equipment.
Karl
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Author: Philip Caron
Date: 2026-03-11 02:43
It's probably not just the recording equipment, but also the choices of the engineers, especially in orchestral recordings.
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Author: kdk
Date: 2026-03-11 20:54
Still, there's something I'd say is almost unique in the way recording a clarinet affects the sound and the apparent intonation. I don't often hear the other woodwinds being distorted in the same way. I can't imagine that a sound engineer would deliberately choose to do whatever is causing the effect.
Karl
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Author: brycon
Date: 2026-03-12 01:33
Quote:
I have heard some god-awfully-out-of-tune clarinet playing in some of the early NY Metropolitan recordings I've listened to (one recording of Beethoven's 9th comes to mind - I don't remember what clarinetist was credited). I'm not willing to believe that players that far out of tune (and thin sounding) would have made it through an audition.
The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra is said to have turned into a world-class ensemble during the Levine era. So perhaps there really was some out-of-tune playing in pre-1970s recordings?
I had a class in college with the recently retired principal oboist of the Met. I remember her saying that when she joined the ensemble (late 70s, I believe), personal tuning devices were pretty rare. I've heard her and other older orchestra players say that tuning was a bit of a mess in those days. Now that everyone has access to a tuner, metronome, and recording device in their pockets, serious students grow up stressing about intonation and the general level probably goes up accordingly.
Indeed, I find the level of polish with regard to technique, rhythm, intonation, and ensemble so much better now than in historic recordings, even of very fine musicians and ensembles. But when we have these objective metrics readily available to us, we begin to let them dictate everything: the point becomes to play perfectly accurate rather than to say something. It's similar to how when we wear a fitness tracker, we begin to live our lives in a way that leads to the best sleep score (i.e. maximizing a metric) rather than a way that leads to a truly meaningful life (perhaps occasionally hanging out late with friends and having a bottle of wine). The metric causes us to confuse our goals with our overall purpose(s).
Just some random thoughts for a Wednesday!
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Author: ruben
Date: 2026-03-12 13:16
brycon: You've raised some philosophical questions. -questions that deserve addressing.
rubengreenbergparisfrance@gmail.com
Post Edited (2026-03-12 23:28)
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