I wrote earlier this month about voicing.
The topic seems to keep coming up—I ran across one of Tom Ridenour’s fine videos about the subject, and clarinetist Adam Berkowitz wrote about it on his blog today.
Adam uses whistling to explain voicing, which I had mentioned in my article and which I agree works very well. I do differ with his idea that embouchure is part of voicing; in my mind these are two separate aspects of woodwind playing.
Tom’s video predates my own article by a few weeks. He and I both use the analogy of putting one’s thumb over a garden hose to describe the effect of a “higher” voicing on the airstream. I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out where I might have gotten that comparison; perhaps Tom and I each stole it from a common source.
Adam and Tom both conclude, and I agree, that for the clarinet the voicing should be quite high. Tom goes on to explain (starting after the video’s three-minute mark) that the saxophone’s voicing is low, like the vowels “oh” or “ah,” and similar to that of the flute or oboe. I agree that the flute and the oboe each have a very low voicing (as does the bassoon), but I think the saxophone’s is somewhere between there and the extreme high of the clarinet.
This, incidentally, is why I find mouthpiece pitch exercises (stay tuned for a future article) to be so essential on the saxophone—on the other woodwinds, you can (to oversimplify) push the voicing to one extreme or the other, but with the saxophone you have to aim for a particular spot in the middle. I find this to be something like the vowel in “word.”
| Instrument |
Voicing |
| Flute |
Low (“oh”) |
| Oboe |
Low (“oh”) |
| Clarinet |
High (“ee”) |
| Bassoon |
Low (“oh”) |
| Saxophone |
Middle (“er”) |
I’d like to address the term “voicing,” which I think is often misunderstood. Here’s my best definition:
Voicing refers to the relative size of the oral cavity, which can change depending on the position of the back of the tongue.
There are a number of other terms that are used to describe this same concept in woodwind playing. I don’t take issue with any of these terms individually, and I think that as a teacher it’s useful to have a variety of possible ways to explain this concept. (These terms can become problematic, however, when they are used in opposition to each other: “Open up, and blow cooler air.”)
Here are some examples of ways of describing voicing. I consider the terms in the left column all to be descriptions of the same thing, and those on the right to be likewise equivalent to each other. Read more →
This is a bit of one of the excerpts that I provided for my saxophone students to play at their beginning-of-the-semester band auditions.
Excerpt from Fisher Tull, Sarabande and Gigue
I heard some very fine playing during the auditions, but many of the students were fooled by the “senza vib.,” with some going so far as to use fairly extreme vibrato at the beginning of the note.
As my blog readers already know, of course, senza vibrato means without vibrato. Read more →
There are some terms I sometimes hear woodwind players use that make me think that they don’t know what they’re talking about. I could be wrong. But that’s the impression I get.
I think as woodwind doublers, when talking to players of single instruments, we sometimes give the same impression that obnoxious foreign tourists give—that we have read a few paragraphs out of the guidebook and now consider ourselves experts on the local culture. If you’re a woodwind doubler hoping to function as an honest-to-goodness oboist or clarinetist or whatever, I think it’s worthwhile to speak the language like a native. Read more →
Quick: define “breath support.”
I fear that to many woodwind players (or wind players in general, and maybe singers too) breath support is something mysterious. I have often had teachers stress to me the importance of breath support, but I can’t remember ever having one explain clearly what it is. Read more →
“Flautist” is a pet peeve of mine. I just encountered it again in a message board thread.
These are worth a read:
Am I a Flutist, or a Flautist?
Is it Flutist or Flautist?
To summarize: there doesn’t seem to be any good reason for English-speaking people to say “flautist.” Read more →
In my last post, I listed some alternate titles for “woodwind doubler.” Here are my thoughts on some of them. Read more →
I’ve struggled a little with what to call myself as a player of several woodwind instruments. “Woodwind doubler” seems like the most accepted nomenclature, but “doubler” seems a little inapt for someone who plays more than two instruments (my flute teacher calls me a “five-aler”). Read more →
