Clarinet Fingering Charts & Alternate Fingerings for Playing the Clarinet

Clarinet Fingering Charts & Alternate Fingerings for Playing the Clarinet
Hi! My name is Leslie Burnick and I’m speaking on behalf of expertvillage.com and today I’m going to talk about fingering charts and alternate fingerings. Any method book that you get will come with a fingering chart generally at either the back or the front of the book and in a beginner method you are not going to necessarily have every note, this one goes from the lowest note, which is a low E on the clarinet up to a high D above the staff although the clarinet can go almost an Octave above that but this would be typical in a first year beginner method book. Now you will see some of the notes in the fingering chart, have two or more sets of fingerings for those notes. In general in any fingering chart, the first picture that they show you is the one that you should play the most often. For an example, looking at the D sharp E flat we are going to finger the first two keys, the back hole and then the bottom side key. So this would be the most common fingering for a D flat. And alternate fingering would be this key right here. I personally very seldom use that key just because I just do not find it that comfortable but this would be the most common. So again when you are looking at the fingering charts you want to learn the fingering of the first picture that they give you. As you get more advanced you will want to know some of these alternate fingerings and I will show you why. We are going to have some of the alternate fingerings that you would have. If you had a play for instance a low B flat to a B natural back and forth rapidly, it could sound something like this. It could be very sloppy sounding. So there is an alternate fingering where you have your B flat here and then you are going to put your third finger on this little key right here and then you can do the alternate fingering like this. So it is going to be a much cleaner sound. So again there are times that alternate fingerings work out very nicely. Another one that is pretty common for clarinet is if you have to play an F natural and an F sharp back and forth. Again as you go faster it becomes sloppy sounding so you would put your thumb on the back for your F natural and for your F sharp your finger is actually going to hit the bottom two side keys here and it is going to sound like this. So it is a much cleaner sound. So that is just a little bit about the alternate fingerings and fingering charts on the clarinet.