 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: SecondTry
Date: 2025-08-17 02:07
Ok...I admit, this is cathartic. I just had a difficult practice session.
It seemed like I couldn't make it through a line of play without playing flawlessly.
For 50 years I have dealt with the nuances of this instrument and right now, love it though I do, I am in the mood to express them.
1) From one phrase to the next the same exact note sometimes feels like a crap shoot as to whether it will voice or not. While hardly is piano an easy instrument, it you hit the right note it sounds.
2) The clarinet can be exhausting, and with exhaust comes the likelihood of mistakes.
3) We forever deal with the nuances of the reed; changing often not simply from one play session to the next but within the same session. Sometimes I wish I was a flute player. Then again sometimes I'm glad I'm not dealing with even more issues as a double reed player.
4) We struggle to play notes in tune on a instrument that's designed as a compromise in pitch with its 12th register.
5) Be ever so slightly off in a fingering and things don't happen the way they should.
6) We're forever having to clear out saliva so that certain notes voice.
7) Watching master classes on Youtube is an exercise in frustration sometimes. I just watched McGill profess moving the instrument with the right thumb towards the top teeth and Larry Guy profess the importance of a stiff lower lip. I wise man told me to take what you can from a masterclass and don't let the stuff that can't help you throw you off your game.
8) Particularly during etudes fingers have to be so freaking precise to have no random notes between two desired ones. This becomes only more difficult when pinkies are involved.
9) Have less than a good night's sleep and all these problems seem to exponentiate.
10) Even something is simple as the initial run in Mozart's Clarinet Concerto require such precision fingers that like a tennis serve take such work to master, and is so easily lost if not constantly worked at. Here are some music majors not getting this run up to Russianoff's piano metronome level of perfection.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=youtube+orchestra+clarinet+auditons
...I'll let you people add some more gripes....of soap box.
TIA
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Author: Dan Shusta
Date: 2025-08-17 07:05
SecondTry,
Well...I waited...and waited...and waited for someone else to reply because I have always been just a hobbyist.
First, let me write about your piano comment. You stated: "While hardly is piano an easy instrument, it you hit the right note it sounds."
Not necessarily though in tune...
Per Steinway:
Pianos need to be tuned every time they are moved
https://www.steinwaynaples.com/finding-a-piano/mythbusting/moving/
So...pianos have their own set of peculiarities.
Second, the clarinet. When you stated: "From one phrase to the next the same exact note sometimes feels like a crap shoot as to whether it will voice or not", the first thing that came to my mind was the complexity of the music being played. Can you play "Stranger on the Shore" flawlessly, again and again? I'll bet you can. Why? Because it's a simple song. Now, when you move over to Mozart...that's an entirely different story. So, IMHO, the greater the complexity of the music, the more difficult it's going to be to play.
Third, Endurance. To me, endurance can only come through lots and lots of playing...everyday...for at least several hours.
In 2007, on his 83rd birthday, Roger Williams played a 14.5 hour marathon at the Reagan Presidential Library.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6x2PS_kIps
Yes, the clarinet, imo, is a very flawed, compromised instrument and due to its compromised construction, it will never be able to be played perfectly.
It's just the nature of the beast.
p.s. Another thing I thought of this morning is the need (at times) for alternate fingerings. When a player can sound a particular note with two or more fingering options, not only is the pitch affected but the tonal color of the note (and sometimes its intensity) can also be affected. (I've experienced this more than a few times.)
Not so with the piano.
More concisely stating what I wrote above, I view the entire clarinet (including mouthpieces and reeds) as a very flawed instrument due to its compromised construction design and these flaws are what makes playing the clarinet so difficult.
All of the above are simply my opinions.
Post Edited (2025-08-17 18:41)
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Author: SecondTry
Date: 2025-08-17 19:18
..all very fair Dan with the caveat that the well serviced piano will voice a note when the player fingers it correctly. The clarinet...well, less certainly....
And sure, again, piano is an extremely hard instrument, and there are a hundred nuances to how such note is fingered, from duration of touch to strength, etc.
Believe me, reading one staff at a time is enough for me. Sometimes rhythms are complex enough, but to be doing two different complex rhythms with each hand simultaneously....too much for me.
And yes, simple phrases are flawless for me, but when I start playing the stuff out of advanced etude books....I'm glad if I can get out a line of music without errors.
Thanks for your perspective. I was just unusually frustrated with my play yesterday.
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Author: kurth83
Date: 2025-08-18 02:13
I am still a relatively new student. I read this quote from another trumpet player who took up clarinet a little earlier than I did:
Fingerings on clarinet are 25x HARDER than trumpet!!! He didn't exagerate at all. I call it finger ballet, every finger has to be perfect.
For me, I want a hard instrument in my old age, it will help keep my brain healthy.
I guess I figured that all the terrible problems would go away with practice, but I guess if after 50 years of clarinet playing for you it didn't, I guess it won't happen for me.
For me I was just hoping that crossing the break would get effortless in time, but I guess it never really will. Kinda like driving over a speed bump 1000 times doesn't make it go away, you just get better at slowing down for it. :-)
I suppose if you ever get too frustrated you can always pull out a saxophone. :-)
If somebody invented something as simple as a closed hole clarinet (like a closed hole flute), it would go a long way towards making the instrument easier to play.
But pro flute players scoff at them, I suppose we would too. :-)
Aging classical trumpet player learning clarinet as a second.
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Author: Fuzzy
Date: 2025-08-18 04:52
David,
I agree with you whole-heartedly!
The complexity with most things is defined by:
1. How much we're initially enamored by the thing
2. Whether we want to put in the work necessary to be proficient at it
3. How dedicated/picky we are about defining proficiency.
Having said that, I'm not sure clarinet is any harder than any other thing in which someone wants to achieve perfection. Baseball? Bowling? Skiiing? Football? Flute? Electrical Engineering?
It really doesn't matter what the "thing" is - the more dedicated we become at achieving perfection, the harder we find that thing to be. Yet to outsiders there's probably no difference between where we want to be, and where we are - because the differences become so nuanced that experience is required to detect them.
Fuzzy
;^)>>>
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Author: SecondTry
Date: 2025-08-18 05:24
David Eichler wrote:
> You think clarinet is hard? Try playing Classical guitar. :-)
I get that. I really truly do. And I love clarinet, and it's not like virtuosic proficiency is easy on anything.
I just wish clarinet, like piano, and that classical guitar, as hard as they are, like a, say, recorder, played the same from one day to the next and it was just me that varied. 
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Author: Philip Caron
Date: 2025-08-18 15:03
Technically simple passages can be the hardest to express well. It's almost like the listener's ear wants to hear the same density of changes regardless of the speed of the notes, so one can/must convey the appropriate density of expression at all times, adding "indicated" changes or choices of phrasing, tempo, dynamics, attack/decay, ornamentation, etc. Pianists fear Schumann's Traumerei.
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Author: EaubeauHorn
Date: 2025-08-18 20:48
It took me a while to realize that there are two major facets to being a high level player; one is obviously musicality, but the other is athletic ability. I found I am not at the highest level in terms of athletic ability, and it sounds like you are running into that barrier. You can hear the music and could play it musically if only your body would agree to do it. I reached regional level orchestral level on the violin, and realized I wasn't going any higher. People I went to high school with, who were "behind" me in high school, had more of that type of athletic ability than I did -- I get sort of spastic and miss things, no matter the instrument, when the music reaches a certain level of difficulty, and more practice does not get me better. My main "rival" in high school went on to play in Atlanta, well above what I could have achieved.
So -- food for thought. I changed careers to become an engineer and find immense satisfaction and enjoyment playing with others at my level of ability, even though musically I do think I was good enough, a natural pretty much. If the body won't do it, though, the body won't do it; I can't run a four minute mile, either, no matter how much I practice running.
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Author: SecondTry
Date: 2025-08-18 21:45
EaubeauHorn wrote:
> It took me a while to realize that there are two major facets
> to being a high level player; one is obviously musicality, but
> the other is athletic ability.
Agreed. And I've recently upped my aerobic activity to try to compensate for some of that lost via age.
The trick, IMHO, as you enter old age as I am, though is to find activity that doesn't take up 2 or more hours (e.g. aquatic, drying off, winter, etc.) that works the heart and lungs while minimizing stress on the joints! lol
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Author: kurth83
Date: 2025-08-18 22:20
As far as physical ability goes, one nice thing about clarinet is there is a partial way out, you can compensate with mouthpiece and reed. You may not have the tone or power that would cut it in a professional environment, but you can at least have full command of the range and technique of the instrument. So the literature itself is accessible to you.
That is the one thing I find good about clarinet as opposed to say trumpet, where if you aren't superman, you can't play hardly anything written for that instrument. Mouthpiece and horn adjustments just don't get you very far there.
It's actually why I took up clarinet in the fist place. It was disappointing for me to discover I am physically limited here too, although I'm still too early in this process to know where my final limits are.
Aging classical trumpet player learning clarinet as a second.
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Author: David Eichler
Date: 2025-08-18 22:53
"I just wish clarinet, like piano, and that classical guitar, as hard as they are, like a, say, recorder, played the same from one day to the next and it was just me that varied. "
I made the switch to Legère reeds and am not looking back. You can eliminate the variability of wooden clarinets by playing synthetic ones. The Backun Alpha is a very good student model clarinet that can be used in professional situations in a pinch, and Backun also makes a premium model carbon fiber clarinet, for a correspondingly premium price.
Btw, acoustic pianos and acoustic guitars are subject to variations in their responses due to climatic conditions.
Post Edited (2025-08-18 22:55)
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Author: SecondTry
Date: 2025-08-18 23:38
kurth83 wrote:
> As far as physical ability goes, one nice thing about clarinet
> is there is a partial way out, you can compensate with
> mouthpiece and reed.
> That is the one thing I find good about clarinet as opposed to
> say trumpet
Thanks. This was not only very useful perspective but in my case true in that I play a relatively closed tip and weak strength reed to that I did when younger.
Funny, exhausted in some concert bands after us clarinets act effectively as the group's violins (at least in the many works adapted for band from originally being orchestral works) it was always a bit of zinger for me for the the music director to say things like, "trumpets, take this an octave down if you want," or "rest this part," or "save your strength."
I guess we clarinets may be winded, but the trumpets both winded and exhausted.
Someone smarter than me once said that "great musicians are half musician half athlete."
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Author: SecondTry
Date: 2025-08-18 23:45
David Eichler wrote:
> I made the switch to Legère reeds and am not looking back. You
> can eliminate the variability of wooden clarinets by playing
> synthetic ones.
Much variability can be reduced true. More so with a plateau clarinet perhaps.
And it my choice to play mostly cane, so I guess that's my burden to carry silently. Of course physical limits affect the player on the most natural or synthetic setup, and of course that's not limited to clarinet. I still think there's things I get out of cane and not Legere's--for all the advances they've made (and I think they've made many and are wonderful) --that find me playing wood reeds.
> Btw, acoustic pianos and acoustic guitars are subject to
> variations in their responses due to climatic conditions.
>
Sure. No doubt. I'd hope less so than us natural instrument players though.
See again the point about "my choice" above, in fairness to facts over me.
I think what got this thread going for me as that despite significant advances in my play, tough literature still has loads of mistakes for me.
I guess why the book says "advanced" on the cover, and I need to adjust my expectations.
>
> Post Edited (2025-08-18 22:55)
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Author: David Spiegelthal ★2017
Date: 2025-08-19 00:46
As a lifetime clarinetist but a fairly recent oboe student, I feel that oboe is harder.
And oboe reeds are an order of magnitude more work (not to mention outright treachery!) than clarinet reeds. Consider that the oboe reed also functions as the mouthpiece, so you can add another variable to the multi-variable playing problem....
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Author: Chris Sereque
Date: 2025-08-19 03:20
Hi Second Try,
As someone who has been playing for almost a quarter century more than you, we all have felt the same way as you on many occasions! When I studied with R Marcellus, his advice was not to stray too far from the Mozart Concerto: I have always tried to keep the first few phrases sounding decently. Rose 32 and 40 are always on my stand, along with the Baerman scales. You also might try playing Rose 40 up or down a semitone very slowly. In all this, the goal is to have a repertory of studies, which are always in your fingers, before tackling more difficult pieces. Hope this helps!
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Author: SecondTry
Date: 2025-08-19 04:55
Chris Sereque wrote:
> Hi Second Try,
> As someone who has been playing for almost a quarter century
> more than you,
That would mean you've been playing almost 75 years.
> When I studied with R Marcellus, his advice was not
> to stray too far from the Mozart Concerto:
I'm not sure what this means. Is it a metaphor or saying? Is it to encourage not learning other pieces (can't be)?
> I have always tried
> to keep the first few phrases sounding decently. Rose 32 and 40
> are always on my stand, along with the Baerman scales. You also
> might try playing Rose 40 up or down a semitone very slowly. In
> all this, the goal is to have a repertory of studies, which are
> always in your fingers, before tackling more difficult pieces.
> Hope this helps!
If there's an etude book I'm likely to have it, rotating among them. Here's one that it's impossible to grow bored of or memorize but its definitely, as you say, one of the more difficult pieces:
https://tinyurl.com/yzhhtfmr. It's author is a regular here.
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