Improving projection

Especially on bass clarinet, you may want to "push" the air until you start to get an edge to the sound. It will sound harsh and not very "pretty" to your ears which are only a foot or two from where the tone comes out of the instrument, but 20 feet away, the tone will have a full resonant sound. On bass clarinet a good mouthpiece makes all the difference in the world. The "Woodwind Educator" is a mouthpiece that facilitates a big sound without having to work too hard. If your school has any recording equipment, you can record yourself from a distance to find what sound you like the best. The soprano clarinet works on the same principle, but I would try for more "resonance" or "ring" to the tone rather than and "edgy" sound as on bass clarinet. The difference of course is the register each instrument plays in. Good luck. I hope some of this helps.

John

MM said:

Oh, you mean like "play with warmer air or faster air or" ....?!!!

Click to expand...

When you play the clarinet right after a sax, you can't help but notice how different the two feel to blow. The sax will take as much air as you can blow through it. There's less resistance. The clarinet kind of has a limit as to how much air can go through at once. A lot of people take this to mean that the clarinet takes less air than the sax. This is not true. The clarinet takes just as much air as a sax, but it needs to be much more focused.

Think of your airstream like a garden hose. The spigot would be your lungs and the open end would be your mouth. The rest of the hose is...everything in between. I apologize for my lack of knowledge of the structures of the human respiratory system and garden hoses. I need to read more about both, but I think I can make my point.

On clarinet, the air needs to move faster through this little tiny mouthpiece and bore. Think of the hose on full blast, but you're pinching the end shut a little bit or partially covering the hole so that there is only a small opening. The water speeds up and shoots out in a smaller stream. The full amount of water from the spigot is needed to keep the stream strong. It won't work if you don't give it enough water. This kind of focused airstream is what's needed to efficiently direct air through a clarinet. You need to blow as much air and support that air just as strongly as on a sax, but with a high, arched tongue (eeeeeee) and a strong, firm, efficient connection between the airstream and the mouthpiece, aka embouchure.

It's more complicated than that, of course, but it would take a lot longer than one post on this forum to get into that. I'll probably spend my whole life trying to figure it out.

I hope that made sense!

I agree with Gordon that the amount of air is different for the clarinet and sax. The air stream used when playing a woodwind instrument has four separate components (however these are related and work together to produced the desired sound and pitch). They are:

-Speed........which helps determine the pitch or register of the note
-Volume.......which determines the loudness
-Pressure.....which affects the quality or timbre of the sound
-Direction.....which affects the overtones and timbre and produces altissimo notes

Because of the different angle of the mouthpiece, the smaller tip opening, and the fact that the clarinet plays near the top of the mouthpiece pitch, the soprano clarinet cannot accept the same volume of air as the sax. All the other components of the airstream can certainly be the same.

John