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Re: tuning chalumeau

Author: jdbassplayer
Date: 2020-05-15 03:21

This seems to be almost a universal problem on chalumeau, found on both historic and modern versions in my admittedly limited experience. Trying to decrease the size of the lowest tonehole will affect the lower register and will make the lowest notes stuffy.

If you want to fix it you would have to enlarge the bore relative to the mouthpiece size, you would then need to add a register tube. At this point you would basically have a Baroque clarinet...

If you have a piece that goes above the high F, the best thing to do is switch to a chalumeau in a different key. I purchased a chalumeau in C for a friend to use, only to find that most of the literature I could find was written for the F instrument. It seems it's best to have a set of both in order to cover the literature. The limited range of the instrument is unfortunate, but they really do sound lovely in a baroque ensemble.

-JDbassplayer

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