 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: Reese Oller
Date: 2022-09-26 06:28
I've recently taken on Eb clarinet as a way to challenge myself. I cannot believe how different it is to soprano clarinet, bass, and contrabass. My experiences using the soprano as a baseline for comparison have been LOWER, more fingerspacing, more weight, more air, less firm embouchure.
Going higher is a lot harder.
So, I can handle most of the registers. But the altissimo beyond D# has me bungled! I need tips from real Eb clarinetists! Also, the intonation.... *excuse me, I need to go vomit* However, I feel like having perfect pitch makes it a bit easier to tell when I'm out of tune.
Post Edited (2022-09-26 06:30)
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Author: Marnix van den Berg
Date: 2022-09-26 17:16
Stiffer reeds often help in altissimo for me. I use 3.5 atm. With 3 I can get a nice tone but very hard to hit high G or higher.
Intonations there is helped by using alternative fingerings, usually opening more keys to raise intonation on anything above high D.
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Author: Hunter_100
Date: 2022-09-26 17:18
I just started playing eb last year, so I know your pain. Here are some tips I can offer:
1: You need a decent instrument in outstanding condition. If you bought one of those $150 ebs online, you are going to have a lot of trouble with intonation. All the pads need to be really well adjusted and with no leaks. If you are playing on a used instrument, take it to a good shop and have them go over it to check out leaks, key heights, etc. It will be money well spent.
2: The combination of mouthpiece, barrel, and reed is really important for intonation. Get a decent mouthpiece. My clarinet came with a vandoren B40 that was perfectly ok, but I have since upgraded to a Fobes san fransisco. When I was trialing mouthpieces, I tried several of the other Vandorens and some of them had really weird tuning tendencies. I did not try enough duplicate models to say if it was a problem with the particular mouthpiece or the whole style. The point is, try some different mouthpieces and see if any play better for you. I also found that the closer facing mouthpieces like the 5RV was easier for me to hit high notes in tune, but it had wonky sounding throat tones. I found this was not the case with the Fobes though, so maybe it is just a better internal design or I tried a bad 5RV? I don't know...
I have also notice that every now and then I will get a reed that just has bad intonation. I never really had this issue with Bb. So I would try several reeds with a tuner and see if any are better or worse for your problem notes.
On my eb, if I have to pull the barrel more than about a 1 mm, it causes the throat tones to go crazy flat in relationship to the rest of the horn. I will eventually get tuning rings or a longer barrel to deal with this, but it is not usually a problem since I'm not usually that sharp. You may want to try and see how your instrument plays with the barrel all the way in. If it is better, than look for solutions like I mentioned so you don't wreck the throat notes.
3: You need to try different fingers for the altissimo notes compared to Bb. A lot of people will probably suggest you look at the Hadcock Eb excerpt book. I bought it, and for my Noblet is has been less helpful than I had hoped. I believe that Hadcock probably played a different brand of clarinet than mine, and a lot of his "suggested" fingers do not play the same on my instrument. I have had much better success looking at the fingerings on this website:
https://www.wfg.woodwind.org/clarinet/index.html
Look at the alternate altissimo, and try all of these to see if they play better. Many of them are also in the Hadcock book too. I don't have the Ridenour fingering book, I would imagine that contains a lot of these as well. Another good spot for some alternate fingerings is Michael Richards website. The website links are hopelessly broken, but the content is still there if you can figure out how to navigate to it. Check out these pages in particular:
https://userpages.umbc.edu/~emrich/chapter7.html
https://userpages.umbc.edu/~emrich/chapter7-2.html
4: You need a firm embouchure and good voicing, but don't bite. I'm sure others on this board can write this out more exactly than I could, but your tongue has to be right or the high notes will be flat, or worse they will sound the lower partials. And you need a different tongue position on the lower notes or they will sound the upper partials on accident. The eb is easier to jump around the partials in my opinion compared to the Bb.
Post Edited (2022-09-26 17:33)
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Author: super20dan
Date: 2022-09-26 17:31
close tip mpc and hardest reed you can play help . i have found no magic mpc brand to help so far. i have 3 horns and all 3 are difficult past alttissimo d. lucky this range isnt oft needed in eb music. synth reeds are not recommmended they make this issue worse for me
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Author: Hunter_100
Date: 2022-09-26 17:42
super20dan wrote:
> close tip mpc and hardest reed you can play help . i have found
> no magic mpc brand to help so far. i have 3 horns and all 3 are
> difficult past alttissimo d. lucky this range isnt oft needed
> in eb music. synth reeds are not recommmended they make this
> issue worse for me
I have to disagree with two of your assertions: If you go too hard on the reed strength, it will be hard to play the lower notes and throat notes especially and they will sound fuzzy and airy. So you will possibly fix one problem at the expense of another.
eb music goes above altissimo D ALL THE TIME. I played perhaps 15 pieces last year that needed eb, and all of them went above D. This upcoming concert alone I have 6 pieces for eb, and all of them go above D, a lot. I would say that most band pieces don't go above F#, but I have seen maybe 5 Gs, a couple G#s and 2 A's so far (in 1.5 years of eb in a good local concert band). When I see G# and A, they are usually also written as optional lower parts too but not for F# and down.
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Author: Hunter_100
Date: 2022-09-26 17:44
Just to check, are we talking about eb sopranino or eb alto clarinets here? I assumed this post was about the little guy...
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Author: Steve Becraft
Date: 2022-09-26 19:21
I'm going to take this a slightly different direction and focus on overall fundamentals for a moment. I do not consider myself to be an E flat player, but as a clarinetist I've had some opportunities to play it in orchestra (strangely enough it's almost always Carmina Burana!). I had access to a decent older Buffet and paired it with a 5RV and Vandoren 3.5.
Using the conventional wisdom of "the E flat needs an extra firm embouchure" led to very sharp upper register intonation. I don't remember if I read it somewhere (the Hadcock book?) or if I just discovered it myself, but I began practicing the clarion register WITHOUT the register key as a way to find my optimal voicing (tongue position) paired with only the essential embouchure pressure. I found that the necessary voicing was even higher than I thought, and once I could play scales through the register change without using the register key at all, I had better overall control of intonation in BOTH fundamental and clarion registers! Then, when addressing the altissimo I wasn't doing anything detrimental at that point and simply had to work on fingerings that were most reliable and in tune. (Which is not to say that it is easy!)
While this isn't specifically advice about playing the altissimo, perhaps it could be useful for you or someone else!
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Author: Reese Oller
Date: 2022-09-26 19:48
All right, this is cool! I have a 5RV for my Bb clarinet, as well, trialing it with about three different ones anyway(Bd5, B40, 5RV, Yamaha 5C) and I found that i love the closer facing mouthpieces on Bb. I have a nameless mouthpiece on a Buffet E11 Eb SOPRANINO, and I play with a 3.5. Should I move up to a 4? I'm getting great sound and intonation where I am, just not on altissimo.
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Author: Hunter_100
Date: 2022-09-26 20:27
You need to try lots of reeds and see how it goes. Over the past year, I bought a box of vandoren 2.5, then 3, then 3.5, then 4 reeds in traditional. Then I tried 4's, 3.5s, and 3's in V12. I settled on the 3.0 V12s for my B40. The San Francisco plays pretty nice also with the 3.5 V12s, but I just got a box of White Master Bbs 3.5s for that one, since Fobes says the mouthpiece was designed for them. I have not reached a firm conclusion there, but they do sound and play nice so far (edit: after a few months of playing, I can definitely say the 3.5 white masters play better. The regular eb reeds on the Fobes have a more buzzy sound especially in throat tones). At some point I will have to try the white masters on the B40 and see how that plays.
You can also try standard Bb reeds too. I did not really like them, but lots of other people advocate for them. If you have the stock E11 barrel, you will have to cut the reeds shorter at the butt end so they don't overlap the barrel ring.
I really like variations on throat tone fingerings for altissimo. They work well on my eb. I use an F# fingering for C#, no register key. Also the side key variation for F# works too to make C#. Open G fingering for D, and you can add the register key if it helps but I don't use it. Throat Ab makes a D#, Throat Bb for E. Add the right trill keys to throat Bb will make F and F# depending on which ones. You can also add trill keys to the throat Ab to make F# depending on the run of notes. Adding the typical eb pinkie key on all of these sometimes makes them slightly sharper or sound a little easier for me. You can also add various sliver keys and other side keys to try and move the pitch around a little.
For loud sustained notes, the "long fingerings" for F and F# work great too. For E, you can use the normal altissimo fingering plus add your first finger left hand too. All of these are in the fingering chart I shared earlier too but not all in Hadcock's book.
I find that the fingers for B, C, and D tend to be sharp with normal fingerings. As Steve said, you can lose the register key with appropriate voicing and it brings the pitch down. On the normal D fingering, you can also lose the pinkie eb key but on my instrument it makes the note more unstable (but flatter).
Post Edited (2022-10-24 21:26)
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Author: Reese Oller
Date: 2022-09-26 20:38
Hmmm... I don't have that eefer right now (I'm in school, so it's safely in my band locker), But from the looks of it, I have the stock barrel. It is about twenty years old, i think, and it has a ring missing on the bottom of the barrel. Claron E and F are really unstable if I don't attack it PERFECTLY.
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Author: Hunter_100
Date: 2022-09-26 20:46
I would bet money you have a leaking pad. E and F in the clarion should not be trouble. You should find the missing barrel ring or have it replaced. You might split the barrel, especially when it starts to get cold and dry in a few months.
If that horn has sat unplayed for a while, don't waste your time on it until you can get it serviced to fix all the problems.
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Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2022-09-26 21:57
Reese Oller wrote:
> Hmmm... I don't have that eefer right now (I'm in school, so
> it's safely in my band locker), But from the looks of it, I
> have the stock barrel. It is about twenty years old, i think,
> and it has a ring missing on the bottom of the barrel. Claron E
> and F are really unstable if I don't attack it PERFECTLY.
Definitely get the ring replaced.
Although the Eb clarinet is in one main section, it does (or my 1960s Buffet does) have a bridge mechanism between the upper and lower key stacks. This bridge has to perform the same balancing act as the bridge keys between the two main sections of a soprano. If the adjustment is right, the pad above the RH index finger pad that closes with the index finger ring for ![[Bb3]](http://test.woodwind.org/clarinet/BBoard/smileys/bb3.gif) and ![[F5]](http://test.woodwind.org/clarinet/BBoard/smileys/f5.gif) and the pad under the throat A key that produces ![[Eb4]](http://test.woodwind.org/clarinet/BBoard/smileys/eb4.gif) and ![[Bb5]](http://test.woodwind.org/clarinet/BBoard/smileys/bb5.gif) close simultaneously and completely. If the adjustment isn't right, one of those pads will close first and the other will be kept slightly open. If the upper pad is closing first, it could be keeping the lower pad from closing completely without very firm pressure on the ring.
Or, it could be a leaky pad or pads somewhere above the RH index finger.
Karl
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Author: Reese Oller
Date: 2022-09-26 22:04
Oh, my. Well, I don't have any free time until next week. I hope this isn't too much of a problem! After all, the only temperature changes it's going through right now are between my playing and room temp.
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Author: Hunter_100
Date: 2022-09-26 22:15
It is not the temperature alone that will crack it. Its a combination of both temperature and humidity. The inside bore will expand from warm breath as well as from absorbing moisture from your breath/spit. The bore will expand more than the outside of the barrel which is still cold and dry which creates tension that will split/crack the wood. The expansion pressure from the cork and tenon on the top joint further adds to the stress. The metal rings contain the expansion so the wood does not split. That is why all-wood barrels are usually massively larger than their ringed counterparts, they have to withstand a lot of force.
The fact the ring came off in the first place tells me the wood dried out and shrunk a lot, which means it will likely revert back to original size once you start playing it and humidify the wood again.
If no one has played it in a long time, you should follow the same protocols that are used to break in a new clarinet, i.e. only play for short durations and swab frequently.
Tell your band director to fix their school instrument. The school should have a repair person and a budget for these sorts of things, and since it is the start of the year they probably haven't spent all the money yet...
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Author: Reese Oller
Date: 2022-09-26 22:22
He just bought a new bari sax, and is bringing a composer to my school to perform a piece... But I'll check.
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Author: super20dan
Date: 2022-09-27 02:17
i agree on the too hard a reed may exchange one issue for another but i will take this trade off in order to make the high notes speak vs them not comming out at all
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Author: super20dan
Date: 2022-09-27 19:27
yes there is a lot of compromise going on to play the effer well. its not known as the little black wand of Satan for nothing
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Author: Reese Oller
Date: 2022-09-27 20:45
Yeah, I really have started to hate it. At this point I have an URGE to master it. That, and I know that if I have any chance in an orchestra, it's not gonna be skill-based. It's going to be "utility," and I'm fine with that!
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Author: super20dan
Date: 2022-09-27 23:41
right now i only play the effer on the star spangled banner . its a blastto be an oct above the entire rest of the band. you have to be able to nail the altissimo d with gusto. using a hite mpc and vandy 3 reed. blue box
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Author: Hunter_100
Date: 2022-09-28 00:24
We are supposed to play Hammersmith at the next concert, I'm lookin forward to the eb part in that one.
Last year, Piston's Tunbridge Fair gave me the most fits of any of the pieces. I barely pulled it off at the concert.
Post Edited (2022-09-28 00:24)
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Author: Ebclarinet1
Date: 2022-09-30 06:09
One item I find incredibly useful is the Clark Fobes Eb clarinet extension. It makes the 12ths in much better tune and frankly improves the intonation of the whole horn.
I used to play very hard reeds but my sound really suffered. Now I play 3 1/2 Steuer Exclusive Bb reeds with the butt end cut off to fit my mouthpiece. Really gives a big full sound on Eefer.
Every Eefer seems to want a different set of altissimo fingerings and I've played Selmer, LeBlanc and Buffet models. I'm ecstatic over the Buffet Tosca right now.
In May I played the American premiere of Gomez's "Scent" for Eb and concert band. Very fun piece and up to high A's (printed, high C actually). and yes I agree that almost all the Eefer parts are in the high end of the horn.
Eefer guy
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Author: Hunter_100
Date: 2022-09-30 20:05
I had not heard that piece before, but there is a recording with the score on youtube. That is a very cool song. I appreciate the division of melody between the solo part and the band. I imagine it is probably nice to have those long rests.
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Author: super20dan
Date: 2022-09-30 22:19
recently scored a chas bay effer mpc in mint cond. strange thing about it is it needs very soft reeds! even my mitch lure 2.5 ,s are too hard. my alto and bass bay mpcs like soft reeds too but this is on a whole different level.
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Author: Ebclarinet1
Date: 2022-10-01 07:55
Hunter 100,
Scent is a great piece of music. The cadenza is a killer but very interesting to play.
Eefer guy
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Author: EbClarinet
Date: 2022-11-28 03:15
I've been playing eefer since I was 28. I'm going to suggest some thing that every 1 will disagree.
I can't yet play the altissimo A on eefer or C Clarinet, but I can (in tune) hit the G#. How ever, on these 2 clarinets and to play the altissimo Eb on soprano saxophone, I bite like crazy on #4 Rees an it works an it's in tune! College and directors an community band directors have complimented me for years on how well I play in tune, especially in the altissimo register on C and eefer.
I've a very strong embouchure and requirement top of the line equipment. I hope this helps some.
https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/mbtldsongministry/
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Author: smokindok
Date: 2022-11-28 09:25
EbClarinet wrote:
“How ever, on these 2 clarinets and to play the altissimo Eb on soprano saxophone, I bite like crazy on #4 Rees an it works an it's in tune!”
Holy Top Tones! Altissimo Eb on soprano sax? Are contemporary composers actually writing parts that go that high on soprano sax, or do jazz guys solo up there? My playing is pretty much limited to theater pits, and only on rare occasion have I seen any altissimo on sax and never anything close to that high. I do remember the “Megamix” version of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat had a bunch of altissimo Gs on alto. But on soprano, and I’ve done a fair number of shows that called for soprano, I don’t remember seeing anything above a F6.
Considering most modern sopranos are keyed up to F#6, if not G6, what kind of music are you playing that calls for altissimo on soprano sax?
John
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Author: Hunter_100
Date: 2022-11-28 18:41
Biting and overly stiff reeds are not necessary to play the high notes in tune. With the appropriate voicing and choice of fingering they should be playable with the usual jaw pressure.
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Author: EbClarinet
Date: 2022-11-28 21:55
I've played with the community band and it's crazy on show tune for the Bb soprano sax. I'm talking about the sopranino or tiny Eb sax that's an octave above the alto. I've momentarily written for an altissimo G for the alto sax. I actually want to get the soprillo sax which is an octave above soprano sax.
https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/mbtldsongministry/
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Author: cigleris
Date: 2022-11-29 02:16
Hunter_100 is correct. I can easily hit a super C on Eb with just a 3.5 reed and all the chromatic notes in between.
Peter Cigleris
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