 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: Fuzzy
Date: 2020-09-22 21:41
I have a lack of understanding pertaining to the descriptive terms used in so many posts...things like "dark" "covered" "warm" "spread" etc. As a result, most posts containing these words are confusing/meaningless to me. About the time I think I have things figured out - the words are used in a way which doesn't fit my understanding.
Are the sound concepts of "dark" "covered" "warm" "spread" etc. something we could all hear in live performances? In recordings? Are they only heard by the player him/her/self?
Is there any way to share examples of the various sound types/concepts?
Thanks,
Fuzzy
;^)>>>
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Author: Paul Aviles
Date: 2020-09-22 21:54
It is complicated by the definition depending on the what an individual hears.
Generically you might say that sounds with more overtones in it such as Gigliotti or many (but not all) recorded sounds of Drucker could be considered "bright." Whereas sounds with fewer obvious overtones are considered darker such as Alfred Prinz or Frank Cohen (apologies to those who don't agree with my ears........or those who don't remember these folks).
There are singular sort of sounds such as that of some German players like Karl Leister and (more recently) Wenzel Fuchs. I've seen people willing to argue to the last drop of air that these players have a bright sound, AND just as many argue that their sounds are very dark. I don't even have an opinion that that one, I just love that sound.
..............Paul Aviles
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Author: kdk
Date: 2020-09-22 23:01
Fuzzy wrote:
> I have a lack of understanding pertaining to the descriptive
> terms used in so many posts...things like "dark" "covered"
> "warm" "spread" etc. As a result, most posts containing these
> words are confusing/meaningless to me.
This was the topic of frequent discussions here and on the Klarinet listserve. The major (but by no means the only) opponent of using any of those words was (the late) Dan Gleeson. Your comment is exactly why those words should generally be avoided in any serious discussion because their meanings are personal to the people who use them and not in any way universal.
You're right to be confused by them and if you find them meaningless, you aren't alone. I guess the solution, if you're interested in what clarinetist A, B or C under discussion sounds like is to find YouTube examples of their playing and judge for yourself. Likewise with equipment. Given that the player has far more to do with the sound than the mouthpiece or instrument (or barrel, etc.), if you really want to know how a piece of equipment would affect *your* sound, the only real way to find out is to get to try it yourself.
Karl
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Author: Dan Shusta
Date: 2020-09-22 23:48
kdk, IMO, you hit the nail right on the head. You gave a very clear and precise response.
May I add one more possible factor which may be causing the confusion? I believe it would be extraordinary difficult if not impossible to find two players that have the exact, precise hearing level responses. And, even if you could find two players with such exactness of hearing, their interpretations of what they hear would most likely not be exactly the same. Hence, to me, sound descriptive words are meaningless.
kdk's suggestion of hearing the sound quality yourself is truly the only way to go. (MO)
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Author: kdk
Date: 2020-09-23 17:42
Yes, Dan Leeson. A pure typo, though I don't know how. Thanks.
Karl
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Author: gwlively
Date: 2020-09-23 21:03
Listen to many wonderful players to decide for yourself what those terms mean. One such web site is Russell Harlow's clarinet central. There you will find players from all over the globe and different time periods all in one place.
Post Edited (2020-09-23 21:07)
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Author: gwlively
Date: 2020-09-23 21:06
Listen to many wonderful players to decide for yourself what those terms mean. One such web site is Russell Harlow's clarinet central. There you will find players from all over the globe and different time periods all in one place.
https://rharl25.wixsite.com/clarinetcentral
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Author: Ed Palanker
Date: 2020-09-24 16:50
It's a good question Fuzzy asks and good responses. It can be confusing because people have different concepts of what those terms mean. Many years ago I speaking of tone concepts with my clarinet students at the Eastern Music Festival and I was comparing some well known players tones to get their reactions. One student said they thought Gigliotti's tone was dark and that mine was bright, I always considered my tone more in the middle "leaning" towards dark. The other students in the class began to laugh out loud and strongly disagreed with him. It's just an example of the difference of opinions. PS. that student went on to study with Gigliotti and returned years later as an alumni guest performer and everyone at that time agreed, his tone was really bright.
I've often compared dark to what the low register sounds like, especially that of a bass clarinet or bassoon, and more mellow than the altissimo, and bright as what a piccolo sounds like especially in it's high register. . I know that's rather general.
As far as "spread" the same to me as "unfocused" meaning no center to the sound, another confusing term. I've discribed that to playing a throat tone G with a loose embouchure, tending to go flat and not remaining "focused". It's easier to demonstrate what "spread" means. More so with dark, bright, mellow etc.
I played with three principal players in my 50 years in the BSO, three different tones. Gennusa, Cohen and Barta.
ESP eddiesclarinet.com
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Author: Nitram
Date: 2020-09-24 17:52
Hello all !
Terms like bright,dark,fuzzy,full bodied,crisp,hollow,etc, etc ad nauseaum, are used to describe almost everything in this planet : wine, paintings, food,women, men, cities, sculptures, etc, Critics would not be able to write if these adjectives were banned. Just read some wine descriptions of taste and texture,,,They could be about clarinet sounds !
Everything is somewhat related to everything. It is just a question of being cautious and inteligent on to how interpret these adjectives, depending who states or receives them.
Post Edited (2020-09-24 17:53)
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Author: Clarineat
Date: 2020-10-03 00:13
I think these terms are very subjective, which is why it's hard to pinpoint exactly what they mean.
However, I'll take a stab at it from what I was taught or how I use the words. But as KDK said they aren't really academic terms so this is just my experience and perspective. However, I believe there are educational benefits to these terms to help the mind relate to concepts.
I think generally a "warm" or "dark" sound can be said to have more prominent low frequencies to the sound, whereas a "bright" or "vibrant" sound might have higher frequencies (more overtones). Think even a low note vs a high note, one is inherently "darker" or "warmer" than the other, and a sound could be made "warmer" by focusing on the fundamental tone and de-emphasizing overtones. Which one is preferable really depends on who you speak to.
"Focused," in my experience is more to do with the clarity of the sound, like with a camera. Imagine a portrait. Is the face easy to recognize, or is the background in focus while the face is obscured, or maybe everything is in focus and the eye is not drawn to the "right" place from a compositional perspective? Sound is "focused" when we can clearly hear what is intended as the fundamental pitch, with the desired amount of overtones colouring the sound, but not overbearing it. Muddy tone, fuzziness in the sound, etc. will of course make this even more unfocused.
"Covered" is a little harder to explain I think because it normally has to do with projection in an orchestral setting. Basically, is the sound "in your face" or does it sort of arrive, as if carried to you in your seat, inside a little package to be unwrapped. This might sound kind of weird, but whenever I hear a covered sound that's projecting without being overbearing this is sort of how it feels! Haha.
"Spread" is kind of the opposite of covered, and really comes from unfocused sound, but this is what happens to unfocused sound over a distance. Think of a laser vs. a spotlight. I was told to think of my sound like a laser so that it doesn't "widen" as it reaches the audience and this concept can help you shape the sound. A spotlight gets wider and thinner as it travels, and you don't want your tone to do this because the back of the concert hall is a long way away.
I hope this helps, and look forward to others' thoughts on these subjective ideas!
Sean Perrin
Host of the Clarineat Podcast
Listen FREE at www.clarineat.com
hello@clarineat.com
Post Edited (2020-10-03 00:16)
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Author: kdk
Date: 2020-10-03 04:57
Clarineat wrote:
> I think generally a "warm" or "dark" sound can be said to have
> more prominent low frequencies to the sound, whereas a "bright"
> or "vibrant" sound might have higher frequencies (more
> overtones).
It makes me wonder, though, in what other context do people associate "warm" and "dark". Are dark places warm? I think more of a dark cave or a dark night as being cooler or colder than a brightly sunlit meadow in the afternoon. You get heat from a bright flame. Sunlight, which is obviously much brighter than moonlight, is also warmer. I know warm and dark are somehow used almost interchangeably when describing timbre, but I have no idea why.
Karl
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Author: Dan Shusta
Date: 2020-10-03 11:32
After doing a fair amount of research into the tonal, descriptive words used above, I would like to try and add a different analysis to what I wrote above. The research I did gave me more definitive, conceptual, and descriptive meanings to possibly take into consideration.
The first word I'd like to redefine is "overtones". Some may not fully understand what this means. I'm sure we can all agree that the clarinet is basically a tube with one end open and the other end closed. The tone that is produced is the fundamental and odd numbered harmonics. Odd harmonics are odd, whole number, numerical tones produced along with the fundamental. The fundamental is actually the first harmonic, then comes the 3rd, 5th, 7th, etc. These odd number harmonics are also referred to as overtones.
So, in referencing to what has been written above by other posters, a bright sound consists of the fundamental coupled with strong or high intensity, odd harmonics in the output. A dark sound would be just the opposite or, in other words, the fundamental tone coupled with very low level, odd harmonics in the output.
The word covered was also mentioned above. According to the Vandoren website listed below, a covered sound is basically an unfocused sound which is usually caused by slow air speed, too low of a tongue position or improper embouchure. Also, using a reed which is too soft or too hard of a reed strength can cause an unfocused or covered tone.
https://www.dansr.com/vandoren/resources/sound-advice-5-suggestions-for-improving-clarinet-tone (Please read Sections 1 and 5.)
The word warm was a little bit more difficult for me to define and provide documentation for. However, according to The Free Dictionary, from the many definitions listed, I chose one found in the transitive verb section and that is #3, "To fill with pleasant emotions". That, of course, is quite subjective because what is pleasant to one person may not be pleasant to another.
https://www.thefreedictionary.com/warm
The spread sound is a diffused or airy sound. The only information I could find was from the SOTW board. https://forum.saxontheweb.net/showthread.php?47049-quot-Focused-quot-sound-versus-a-quot-Spread-quot-sound (Please read all of the responses. I found them to be very informative.)
Hopefully, what I have written above is not too redundant.
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Author: Clarineat
Date: 2020-10-03 20:16
Interesting how subjective (and different) people’s interpretations are. This is not my experience with the word “covered” at all... in fact I was taught it was a desirable trait to the sound. And the way I think of it... it is!
Youre right about the overtones being off harmonics, but I thought this was implied because that’s how the clarinet works?
Sean Perrin
Host of the Clarineat Podcast
Listen FREE at www.clarineat.com
hello@clarineat.com
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Author: kdk
Date: 2020-10-03 21:30
So, any or all of these words (and others) can be useful, to the extent that descriptions of such things are useful at all, within a limited group of teachers, players and students who develop a common understanding of their meanings through shared experience. We in Philadelphia in the '60s and '70s had a fairly well-accepted understanding of what "bright" and "dark," "focused" and "spread" meant within our local clarinet community. Most of us were or had been students of Bonade himself or one of his students. Gigliotti was active and influential as the principal clarinetist of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the rest of the orchestra's clarinet section, once Leon Lester retired, were Gigliotti's students. But outside the local Philly area and clique, I discovered quickly that the words became mostly useless.
I think it's interesting in a way that Vandoren's explanation of "covered" gives it so negative a connotation. I had never heard "covered" used that way, either.
Karl
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Author: SebastianB
Date: 2022-10-16 01:12
I resurface this 2020 thread to say:
The less attention players and teachers pay to nailing this issue down, the more haphazard and useless the terms will become. In this regard saxophone community discussions of the term "spread" are a useful sneak preview.
Words are not gravy poured over life to make it more palatable, they are the essence of our particular way of handling the world. Even an in-person teacher has to use words as part of their communication with the student. Played examples or physical demonstrations are priceless, but they are not sufficient.
More than communication is at stake. Our private thinking depends for its quality on how well our words (our concepts) group real-world phenomena into categories. The more superficial or even random our groupings are, not only will we be less able to communicate, but our thinking will be less effective.
In this era of easy preparation and dissemination of sound, the difficulty of rescuing tone vocabulary and making it objective does not lie in the 'subjective' aspects or technical limitations or even in figuring out how to make the issues objective and communicable. The real challenge lies in the fact that our culture tends to make it less likely that people will understand how crucial and normative the task of conceptualizing knowledge is.
Post Edited (2022-10-16 05:44)
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Author: Paul Aviles
Date: 2022-10-16 06:57
Don't mean to be a party pooper, BUT I have had the playing of Karl Leister (objectively ONE clarinetist) described by one person as very dark, and described by another as very bright. Then you go to hear this person live you may then think, "Oh I was wrong, his sound is the opposite of what I thought."
It's kinda like trying to remember the color of your living room walls when selecting a can of touch up paint. It turns out you need color cards, and samples painted in hidden places. Even then it can be a roll of the dice.
The problem with sound is that there are no swatches.
..............Paul Aviles
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Author: Bob Barnhart ★2017
Date: 2022-10-16 08:56
Interestingly, I’ve sometimes thought of some German players as having both a dark and bright tone, in the same way one might be said to have a dark but reedy sound (e.g., Sabine Meyer).
Some players clearly have lots of harmonics, but don’t have an unpleasantly bright, harsh or edgy sound. This make me think that bright or dark is not simply the presence or absence of harmonics, but rather which harmonics are prominent and which are not. For example, the 12th is considered to be very significant in tone quality.
So perhaps, we could refine our terms by precisely defining the composition and relative strength of the harmonics present in a good (or poor) tone.
For me, good tones may be dark or bright, but they should be resonant (prevalence of odd harmonics) and round (harmonics of fundamental?).
Bob Barnhart
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Author: SebastianB
Date: 2022-10-16 09:33
Paul - that you can come up with an illustration of people not being competent at describing tone is not evidence that competence is not possible. Your analogy leans on the difficulty of exact color matching as to value, hue, and chroma, whereas the issue under discussion is more like being able to name colors in a more general way.
Bob it would not surprise me if objectivity in tone description turned out to be best learned with the help of measured frequency information. I know a violin maker whose ability to identify components of tone was advanced considerably by his use of spectrogram software, to the point that after a time he no longer needed the software.
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Author: kdk
Date: 2022-10-16 21:05
SebastianB wrote:
> Paul - that you can come up with an illustration of people not
> being competent at describing tone is not evidence that
> competence is not possible.
>
> I know a violin maker whose ability to
> identify components of tone was advanced considerably by his
> use of spectrogram software, to the point that after a time he
> no longer needed the software.
The problem isn't really lack of competence in recognizing categories of sound quality. It's one of choosing words to describe them that others will understand in the same way we do. And a good deal of that problem is that most players (and even non-players) tend to include a judgement in their use of the standard terms (which are meant, like it or not, to describe light, not sound). There is almost always a pejorative element in anyone's use of "bright" to describe a tone. "Brilliant" on the other hand is not so heavily negative, but how often do you hear a clarinet that you really want to call brilliant? Yet they mean almost the same thing. "Dark" is applied enthusiastically in my experience to so many tone qualities that it has lost any meaning it once may have had, but describing some of those "dark" sounds as "dull" includes a clear negative prejudice.
As a student of Gigliotti I had a great deal of trouble coming to understand what he meant by "focused" and "centered." I *think* I understood them by the time I finished my studies. Obviously, having a "spread" or "unfocused" tone was a clear negative to be corrected. But at the beginning, I had trouble understanding what it was I needed to correct. In my early days here on the BBoard and the Klarinet list I used those words a couple of times and found others misunderstanding my usage.
Karl
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Author: SecondTry
Date: 2022-10-16 22:38
I'd consider Manasse's sound more covered
https://youtu.be/_QTdwALiOok
I'd consider Gervase de Peyer's less so:
https://youtu.be/U5Ydt-1LltM
I happen to like what I described as the covered sound more but not only is it my opinion, but my opinion on what each sound is best described as could not only differ from other people's opinions, it's even possible that many people would disagree with me, making my interpretations less likely to conform to some semblance of a quasi accepted standard of each type of clarinet sound.
I'm curious what other people think of these two player's sounds in terms of the covered and not covered definitions of clarinet sound, independent of the other nuances of their play.
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Author: SebastianB
Date: 2022-10-17 00:29
SecondTry: I will take a stab at it. Context: I am new to the clarinet world so I am almost certain to use terms in non-standard ways.
Although I understand why you would think of that recording of Manasee's sound as 'covered', I think 'covered' is more useful when it describes a dominant differentiation, i.e. a sound primarily characterized by a lack of upper partials. Here the primary quality is one of diffusion or softness. Dark-seeming, yes, but one senses that the upper partials may be there, but as part of the soft envelope.
de Peyer's recorded sound here has stronger upper partials but it also feels more defined like the partials are more in focus, with a hint of a separation between the highest partials and the rest of the sound, a quality sometimes exhibited very strongly by modern players.
Karl - I agree that musicians have the ability to hear differences, it's a question of "agreement". But I would say really it's a deeper problem of proposing words or meanings which are so well grounded--and framing the issue's importance in such a way--that enough people will go along. I don't think agreement is the standard of value here, but it is (for better and worse) a prerequisite of successful linguistic change.
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Author: Paul Aviles
Date: 2022-10-17 02:36
Another example, albeit older, would be Stanley Drucker’s recording of the Nielsen Clarinet Concerto. I might go out on a limb here and say that a majority of folks who never heard him live would say that is a bright sound. However, if you’d ever heard him live you would probably not say that at all.
And we, as individuals, just hear things differently from one another. Nothing wrong with that. We still have mathematics if you want unassailable accuracy.
…………Paul Aviles
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Author: hans
Date: 2022-10-17 03:32
I see these terms on manufacturers' web sites. IMO they are vague descriptors coined by their marketing departments, easily dismissed, virtually meaningless, and not particularly useful in the real world.
Hans
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Author: kdk
Date: 2022-10-17 03:49
Paul Aviles wrote:
> Another example, albeit older, would be Stanley Drucker’s
> recording of the Nielsen Clarinet Concerto. I might go out on
> a limb here and say that a majority of folks who never heard
> him live would say that is a bright sound. However, if you’d
> ever heard him live you would probably not say that at all.
>
Well, that's a whole other related problem. I can't really say I know what most of the clarinetists mentioned in these posts sound like because the *only* experience I have hearing them is through recordings, and then listening using audio equipment that is hardly state-of-the-art. I have heard very few clarinetists live - Gigliotti and the Phila. Orch. players since, Drucker, Shiffrin, dePeyer and a few others whom I have heard in recitals or a few of the visiting orchestras that have come through here.
But then, I heard Shiffrin live twice - once playing next to him in a free-lance orchestra in the 1970s (just after he left Cleveland) and then from the front row of the Perlman Theater about 10 years ago. He sounded entirely different. And then he sounds different still in the recordings I've heard.
I heard Gigliotti often from the audience in the Academy of Music, standing next to him during lessons when he would demonstrate, and in the recordings of the Philadelphia Orchestra that were ubiquitous through the '50s to the '80s or so. The sounds were very different. He described his own sound as "dark." Others have often described it as "bright." It really depends on which sound of his many you heard.
I heard dePeyer play here near Philadelphia in a chamber concert maybe 40 years ago. There was much more color in his sound than his recordings would have suggested to me. The opposite with Drucker - his recordings, especially the early ones under Bernstein screamed "bright!!!" to my ears, but when I heard him live decades later he sounded very different - smooth, controlled, clear. Not "dark" but certainly not "bright" either.
I could name a few more players whose sounds were different on different occasions when I heard them live and different still on recordings.
So, when we start comparing players' sounds as a way of defining the words we try so desperately to justify and use, we really have to know which recording or which performance is being used as the exemplar.
The problem at its root is that we try to use words that evolved and are understood fairly clearly to describe visual qualities. I'm not sure why an equally clear set of sound descriptors hasn't evolved in parallel. Maybe they have in other languages and only English is aurally deficient. But it seems obvious that the visual vocabulary we try to force won't do the job reliably.
Karl
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Author: seabreeze
Date: 2022-10-17 04:22
There are just too many clarinet sounds and words that miss the mark when you try to apply them. What words can describe the sounds Jimmy Hamilton gets in his solo on Ellington's Caravan? The intense coloration of the clarinet strikingly contrasts with the sound of Juan Tizol's valve trombone, but who can say exactly how or why or what bright, dark, or covered would have to do with it? Hamilton comes in around 1:32: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=the+popular+Ellington+caravan.
<
Post Edited (2022-10-17 19:12)
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Author: Hunter_100
Date: 2022-10-17 22:21
It would be great if someone could make a collection of 5-10 second clips with some kind of voting system to go with each one. Maybe after several hundred people rate each clip, we would arrive at some kind of consensus about each sound.
I also think there is a dire need for a library of "bad" sounds too. I feel like it is just as useful to describe a sound as what it does NOT sound like as opposed to what it does sound like, if that makes any sense.
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Author: Dan Shusta
Date: 2022-10-17 23:38
Hunter_100,
I like your idea. I don't have a collection...only one that I came across yesterday. I was going to post it in jest or for fun due to the title of the video. Anyway, judging just one clarinet tone could possibly be a starting point.
So here it is:
The Secret to Dark, Centered Tone on Clarinet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yx_lhWrmAaA
So...let the judging begin. Is her tone: 1) Dark; 2) Covered; 3) Warm; etc.
Post Edited (2022-10-18 00:06)
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Author: Paul Aviles
Date: 2022-10-18 02:25
A standard, centered, focused French/American clarinet sound. Could easily have been a Marcellus, Brody or Combs student (sorry for the older references.......don't know the new hot teachers out there these days). Anthony McGill of the New York Philharmonic sounds like this. Just heard him this morning on the NBC news talking about the newly reimagined Geffin Hall in NYC.
..............Paul Aviles
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Author: graham
Date: 2022-10-18 03:01
The concept of “covered” tone is a useful one. Another way I hear it is that Manasse has a throaty sound (but not guttural), whereas de Peyer’s is more forward and open. Manasse sounds like it is resonating from a cavity, whereas de Peyer sounds almost as if a loud hailer is projecting it outwards.
One problem with this is that I dislike de Peyer’s tone, but find Manasse delightful. This fact does not assist in choosing neutral descriptive terms.
graham
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Author: Dan Shusta
Date: 2022-10-18 03:19
Hey Paul,
I got a question for you.
In the link that I provided, when she used the proper breathing technique, what % of the tone do you think comes from the equipment and what % of the tone comes from the player?
I really like her tone, however, it's hard for me to believe that simply using a proper embouchure/breathing technique could produce a tone like that.
What do you think?
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Author: seabreeze
Date: 2022-10-18 04:03
Fuzzy may be speaking wisdom when he acknowledges that he cannot account for clarinet tone by applying a few often used labels. On the Ellington recording, I knew the player had to be Jimmy Hamilton and not Barney Bigard (wrongly identified in the notes.) But Hamilton's ID, though deeply recognized, was beyond the scope of analytical words like adjectives. Everything in the tone and style had Hamilton written all over it, not just a checklist of dark, bright, focused, etc. We probably perceive or sense the whole characteristic sound of Hamilton at an intuitive primitive, animal level with all elements combined, and further analysis is pointless or even disruptive. Attempts to compile a statistical index of players' timbre (+a lexicon of clarinet sounds?) with any fidelity to normal semantic distinctions just might produce a Babel of nonsense and irrelevance.
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Author: Paul Aviles
Date: 2022-10-18 05:16
Hey Dan,
I don't attribute sound to equipment.......in that sense. There is the apocryphal story of a fan walking up to Jascha Heifetz backstage after a concert. She says to Heifetz, "Your violin sounded lovely tonight." Heifetz, putting his hand behind his ear leans toward the open case where he just placed his instrument and says, "That's funny, I don't hear it making a sound!"
The bottom line is that the MUSICIAN produces the sound out of the equipment that gives her/him the greatest freedom to achieve that sound.
The secret to a good sound (on clarinet) is finding that perfect balance between the amount of air used and the embouchure engagement for the specific note at a specific dynamic level........a tight rope act. Many beginning students don't understand how much air is required (under estimate the effort). But the real trick is......the air.
.............Paul Aviles
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Author: John Peacock
Date: 2022-10-18 13:03
Hunter_100:
"I also think there is a dire need for a library of "bad" sounds too. I feel like it is just as useful to describe a sound as what it does NOT sound like as opposed to what it does sound like, if that makes any sense."
I've often had the same thought. Do you know the apocryphal Michaelangelo quote about how he was inspired to carve his David? "David was there all along: I just had to get rid of the bits of stone that weren't David" . In a similar vein, I find myself spending more time on the negative qualities of my sound and how to remove them, rather than pursuing positive qualities per se. That may seem defeatist, but so many clarinet sounds suffer from the following deficiencies that concentrating on slaying them must be an efficient route to substantial improvement (and if you haven't fixed these basics, there's little point worrying about more subtle matters):
* Thin/brittle/edgy [Too many high harmonics; probably too soft a reed]
* Buzzy/gurgly [Lack of clarity; probably too closed a lay, or too hard a reed]
* Inflexibility [Sound degenerates in the above ways at ff and pp]
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Author: kdk
Date: 2022-10-18 23:30
Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2022-10-18 23:29
One conclusion that seems to follow from all of this discussion, especially of using sound clips (recordings) to define tone qualities, is that many of us seem to aspire to sounding like a recording. Live sound is so different from the electronic sound we most often hear, even when you're hearing a heavily amplified live performance.
One good way to develop a good concept of sound is to go to live acoustic performances. Preferably of chamber music, where you're likely to be seated closer to the players and the individual performers are more easily heard.
I'll grant that we can probably make valid comparisons among individual recorded clarinet (or any other instrument) sounds, if all we want to do is describe what we've heard. But using them as models for a player's own tone is IMO futile.
A "warm, dark" tone like [recording artist's name] isn't necessarily (or even probably) what a player may think it is.
Karl
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Author: Fuzzy
Date: 2022-10-19 06:58
I sincerely appreciate everyone's take on this. (Especially Karl, Seabreeze, and Dan Leeson's historic context.) Everyone provided great insights and different approaches/views on this topic.
A bit of time has passed since my original post, and (after reading this thread...and many others) I'm coming to the personal conclusion that defining auditory experiences by temperatures, colors, or flavors doesn't really lead to any type of informed discussion - except for, perhaps, specific isolated schools/groups which experience live feedback on sounds they are collectively experiencing. I'm more doubtful than ever that these words are usefully informative amongst musicians in general. I question why they are used at all.
A point that Karl made rings true to much of what we discuss on this bboard: live vs recorded. Karl also mentioned listening to the player up close (chamber music, etc.) How much of what we believe to be a performer's characteristics, might more accurately be attributed to the hall, the sound engineer, the microphone, etc.?
Likewise, Seabreeze's example of Jimmy Hamilton's playing, and Karl's example of hearing the same performer more than once and hearing a different sound (sound concept?) each time.
Well, now I'm off to listen to something interesting like warm dark chocolaty spread...whatever that means. <shrug>
Fuzzy
;^)>>>
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The Clarinet Pages
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