It also never hurts for older or more experienced players to take the time to work on their scales, especially the chromatic scale. Memorizing two or three octaves of a chromatic scale is a must for students at the middle and high school levels. Practicing chromatic scales can be especially helpful for learning the alternate fingerings possible on the clarinet. As they become fluent, they will easily be able to play scales with many sharps or flats. Most young students will start with the C scale and add sharps and flats as they go along. The notes below the staff and on the staff are the most important to learn for young players. It’s also a good idea to spend a week or two on each scale when you’re first starting out. This will go a long way toward increasing your speed and accuracy. Make sure you can play all the important scales fluently, including sharps and flats. Repetition through playing scales is an excellent way to get the positions of the keys fixed in your mind and in your muscle memory. Learning clarinet notes through repetition and scales These book and others like them have tips for mastering fingerings, learning scales and much more. If you’ve even binge watched several YouTube videos to study new techniques, you may have seen one of the books featured there.Įssential Elements books are great because they have a structured approach with a clear presentation. Essential Elements for Band has an excellent series for clarinet that many music teachers and band directors rely on. The idea is to refer to them until you eventually learn the fingerings by heart.įollowing a proper lesson book will take you much further in learning this instrument than the charts alone. Don’t rely too much on charts follow a proper lesson bookĭon’t rely too much on fingering charts themselves. Make sure your hands are flexible enough to get to these positions. While reaching the lowest keys on the bass clarinet and contrabass clarinet can take a bit of stretching. Reaching all the keys with the fingers is relatively easy on the B-flat clarinet. When viewing a fingering chart and using it to learn new notes, always hold the upper joint in your left hand and the lower joint in your right. But some aspects of using charts may be less obvious. Reading and interpreting fingering charts is typically self-explanatory. It’s necessary to use the alternate key located between the first and second tone holes to produce a smooth result. And some clarinet passages are difficult or impossible to play with the primary fingerings taught to elementary and middle school students.įor example, B-flat and B-natural just below the staff are played with the first finger on the right hand alone and the middle finger on the right hand alone. These charts expand depending on the level of the player, starting from easy notes below the staff and on the staff and ending at the very high, or altissimo, register.īut fingering charts can also be an indispensable reference for alternate fingerings. Most young players have basic fingering charts in their band method books to help them learn common fingerings. How fingering charts help clarinetists improve Feel free to download and print the below charts in PDF format at any time. I’ll also share some tips for how to learn the various clarinet notes. Let’s explore how to use common fingering charts like the one below. That’s why, even today, I keep a fingering chart in my at-home practice folder. And a fingering chart can help a lot for this. The positions of all the keys on the upper and lower joints need to be learned by touch. Learning to read a clarinet fingering chart is an essential skill for novice players to learn. But instead I had to sit down and learn them all later as a high school student. I could’ve saved time and effort by properly learning the fingerings in elementary or middle school. Even if you’re an experienced player, there’s always a chance you’ll forget a fingering or need to work out a new alternate fingering for a tricky passage. We can do something similar in improvising our song.Fingering charts are helpful for any clarinetist to have on hand. It goes up and it goes down in the vibraphone. In the next version of the song you hear that the song is mostly referenced in a variation of the opening motive. What happens if you make a melody consisting of this motive started on different notes? It could sound like this: Other options are A-G-F, or B-A-G, or C-B-A. Try to play it starting on different notes but stay in the scale (C major: C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C). In this experiment you can take one part of the song. Here is the original song again for reference:
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |