Re: Streamlining my thoughts on the clarinet woodwind-diagrams

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling]

On 02/08/2013 10:11 AM, Wim van Dommelen wrote:
> But that also has the low-ees, because it still is a "soprano" it sounds higher
> then the low-ees in the bass-clarinet. The key lay-out is similar as the
> basset-clarinet (which is in A, not B flat). Confusing all this is .......

Not really ... ?

Think of it like this:

   * There's the regular soprano clarinet.

   * There's the full-Boehm soprano clarinet, which has a RH low ees key in the
     normal place.

   * There's the basset clarinet, which has extra keys for low ees, d, des and
     c (and conceivably also b).  It's not really predictable how these keys
     will be laid out.

There's no need to think about Bb versus A clarinet, or which octave the 
instrument sounds in, because all fingering diagrams are given with respect to 
key name on the instrument rather than concert pitch.

> I.m.h.o. what should appear is the common name of the key as e.g. used in
> teaching. Example: trill a' - bes' would involved the left-hand a key pressed
> and with the right hand trilling the second key from above on the side. So for
> this bes-stencile on the left hand it should show "A" (or "a") but not in the
> middle but on the top side, for the right hand it should show "Bes" (or "bes",
> but not "2"). In the stencil this bes would be specified as:

Let me be more specific.

The side trill keys are not the issue here -- we should fix how they are 
labelled but that covers _all_ members of the clarinet family.

What I'm asking is, specifically, how should the low extended-range notes -- 
ees, d, des, c -- be placed on the key-name diagram?  How will this differ 
between the different diagrams you suggest?