![]() The answer was to add keys – prosthetic fingers, if you like – to bring the opening and closing of these extra holes within the player’s reach. A much better solution is to drill more holes in the instrument, but, if you do this, you need more fingers. ![]() This use of compromise fingerings leads to significant unevenness of tone, with notes of different strengths and timbres, as well as suspect intonation. Recorder players get round this in ingenious ways such as half-covering holes or flattening a note by closing holes lower down the instrument – something that works after a fashion for the recorder, but cannot be applied on larger-bore modern wind instruments. A scale of C major is fairly straightforward, but problems arise when the in-between notes, the sharps and flats to play in other keys are required. This is a very limited instrument because it has no keywork: there are only as many holes as the player has available fingers. The most primitive woodwind instruments followed the basic design of the recorder. To understand why this cannot be the case for wind instruments, you need a brief history lesson. You only have to look at them to see how they make sense. I am not, for a moment, pretending they are easy, but, at least, they are set out in a regular form. And the clarinet is particularly problematic because a large range is available within a relatively short instrument and fingerings are very different from one octave to the next.Ĭompare this to other instruments such as the piano or stringed instruments. ![]() The problem with clarinet scales is that the arrangement of keywork on wind instruments is chaotic: some keys are pressed to open holes, other are pressed to close holes. ![]()
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