 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: locke9342
Date: 2015-04-14 05:57
Most people just tell you to listen or give some vague( or at least not completely straight forward answer), but has anyone found a good way to explain darkness?
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Author: ClaV
Date: 2015-04-14 06:43
kdk wrote:
> No.
>
> Karl
Why?
The sound complexity can be enormous. Personal preferences may vary.
Yet, one 'sound' thing is in common: bright sound is rich in overtones (higher frequencies). That gives a good starting point to rationalize many observations, e.g. leather ligatures making sound "darker".
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Author: TomS
Date: 2015-04-14 07:33
Dead. Lack of the beautiful combination and balance of overtones. Doesn't carry or project well. A dark foundation needs help with overtones or the sound is dull, lifeless, uninteresting ... a bowl of cold oatmeal with no strawberries, cream or brown sugar.
Tom
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Author: locke9342
Date: 2015-04-14 07:54
"Flat." I think thats the best answer I've hear so far, can you specify like is there a difference between being flat and being dark
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Author: Clarineteer
Date: 2015-04-14 08:14
Dark sound has more bass overtones than treble overtones is the best way to describe it.
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Author: Tony F
Date: 2015-04-14 10:57
Dark sound is like dark matter. 97.3% of the sound in the universe is dark sound. We can't hear it but we know it's there. Clarinets are full of it.
Tony F.
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Author: donald
Date: 2015-04-14 13:47
The problem with explaining "darkness" in the sound (irregardless of whether you think it's a good thing or not...) is that there are quite a few different characteristics that people use the word "darkness" to describe....
- sometimes when people say "darkness" they are trying to describe a sound with a lot of "body", it may or may not have a lot of "ring"/overtones/brightness BUT it generally has a lot of concentrated sound in the middle somewhere, giving an impression of "fatness". When they say darkness what they really mean is "an absence of thinness/shrillness" but they call it "darkness". I often think Karl Leisters sound typified this- it was actually quite BRIGHT, but because people perceived a lot of body in the sound, they called it DARK. I think of it as "concentrated" and "well shaped" but of course those words don't really mean much either!
- sometimes people genuinely are describing the quality/range of harmonics in the sound. As an example- my old Yamaha had a very CLEAR sound, so when i played in an ensemble is sounded bright, that was the predominant quality people noticed. IF I played it on its own at MF dynamic, you could hear that there was actually a very strong element of the fundamental in the sound but also a clarity that might give the impression of thinness, while still actually having DARK harmonics. Jozeph Balogh, on his Hammerschmidt clarinets, sounded way better than I ever did, but this is a quality I have noticed in his playing- a CLEAR sound that still has very strong fundamental harmonics. I've heard lots of players using Pyne mouthpieces with very hard reeds that made another variation of this- clear but dark....
Well, I could write pages more on this topic- this is actually something that I've thought about a good deal over the years, and to some extent think Karls posting "no" was as informative as mine. Really, most people use this term because they can't really describe what they hear, or can't be bothered thinking about it a bit more.
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Author: Wisco99
Date: 2015-04-14 20:21
In college my wind ensemble conductor, an Eastman graduate and clarinet player would always start each rehearsal with us playing a Bach choral, and we would keep hearing him telling us to get a "dark" sound. When he finally achieved a sound that seemed not to project and lacked overtones and sounded dead he was satisfied. We could have arrived at that point much quicker if we all just played into a box filled with cotton balls to suck up all the overtones. A bucket mute on a trombone gets the same effect. It just took the life out of the music. I want to hear color, and color is in the light spectrum, darkness is a lack of light or color. Once I got the heck out of that place and entered the world of conductors for national acts, Broadway shows, and even major symphonies I never heard that term again. Life was beautiful.
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Author: marcia
Date: 2015-04-14 20:29
I have always been amused at the fact that we use "visual" adjectives to describe an "aural" experience.
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Author: Wisco99
Date: 2015-04-14 21:08
I just tried to find an example of a "dark clarinet sound" on youtube, but there was none. In college I heard terms by various teachers asking for a dark sound, pear shaped sound, round sound, bright sound, full sound, shimmering sound, and on flute a sound like a silver thread. I still do not have a clue about what they really wanted me to do. There was one exception, a clarinet teacher who was my saxophone teacher who sometimes posts here. His name was Chester Rowell, and somehow he was able to bring out a sound in me on tenor sax that fit into the classical realm which nobody had ever been able to do. He also accomplished miracles with the clarinet section within his first 2 weeks of teaching there. That was a long time ago, but from what I remember he seemed to focus on positive things and not the negative. He simply played great, and was a great teacher.
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Author: Paul Aviles
Date: 2015-04-14 21:47
Here is where I gave up trying to pin down an answer. At some point a few very fine players described Anthony Gigliotti's sound as "dark."
So it depends on your definition of dark.
I might suggest we might use wider variety of other terms like "room filling," "large," "small," "robust," or "weak."
Or maybe we could just say "I want to sound like so-and-so."
............Paul Aviles
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Author: Wisco99
Date: 2015-04-14 22:10
I want to sound like myself. The person I enjoy listening to the most is Larry Combs, but I do not want to try to sound like him because the best I would ever be is a second best imitation.
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Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2015-04-14 22:57
Paul Aviles wrote:
> Here is where I gave up trying to pin down an answer. At some
> point a few very fine players described Anthony Gigliotti's
> sound as "dark."
>
>
Gigliotti himself considered his sound to be dark. When others, back when I was still studying with him, called his sound bright (one frequent poster on this BB fairly recently called it "the brightest I had ever heard" when describing an early experience hearing Gigliotti play), it was one of the earliest evidences I remember that the word simply had no fixed meaning. I have never consciously used "dark" to describe a clarinet tone since those days.
It does make discussing tone hard to do - the vocabulary that's invariably used, as has already been noted, is borrowed from visual experience. Teachers need to use whatever means - visual references, metaphors and *especially* live demonstration - to communicate with students about sound concepts. Even then, descriptors like muffled, too loud, unsteady, out of tune, lacks resonance, etc. tend to be far more useful than darker and brighter.
Ever since my monosyllabic first response, I've been reading this thread with interest. It's awakening to see so many of the posts associate "dark" with dull, lack of projection and other negative qualities.
Evidenced by countless other threads here, many players today seem to want a "dark" sound more than anything else in the whole world, and makers of instruments, mouthpieces, reeds and barrels invariably advertise their products as producing some variant of "dark" or "warm" (or both) sound. How many posts do we read here from inexperienced players asking what they can buy to give them a "nice, dark" sound?
It's too bad "dark" can't just be outlawed in describing tone, but then we'd have to add bright, warm, and several other equally meaningless words, and most of the current commercial advertising of equipment would need to be completely overhauled.
Karl
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Author: TomS
Date: 2015-04-15 00:08
One of my ex-teachers, Paul (now deceased) studied with Anthony Gigliotti and described Anthony's as: "he's got the brightest sound of any player in an American orchestra" ... and this was coming from someone that most people would describe as being "bright" ... (but I heard Paul as centered with a hollow, haunting ping ... nice!)
All Things Bright and Beautiful ...
Tom
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