Ive decided to take up playing the recorder to hopefully help in my interpretation of the Telemann sonata for recorder that I am playing for my DipABRSM.

Just been looking to buy a cheap recorder to get me started, but quite confused about the differences apart from size. Theres the sopranino, descant, treble and tenor. Which one is closest in fingering to the flute? Any recommendations on which makes and models to buy?

Thanks!

Descant and tenor are C recorders (lowest note is C), in this respect they are probably most similar to the flute.
Sopranino and treble are F recorders (lowest note is F).
I would have thought that the Telemann is more likely to have been written for a treble than a descant.

Like kerioboe says, the C instruments are closer to flute fingering but a treble is the best if you want to play serious music on it I think, and I agree it's probably what the Telemann was written for...

The Yamaha 302 treble is very good, or the woodnote "copies" are good but cheaper, just not quite as widely available (usually available on ebay, I think Liz used to stock them too but I'm not certain)

I don't like descant. I had to play it for 4 years in my Japanese school. The top few notes are too high-pitched for me.

The note on the piece says : The sonata was written for bassoon, but Telemann wrote that it could be played on flute a bec. Since the bassoon part is in bass clef it required no transposition by the recorder player since by playing his usual G clef on the first line he produces the right notes 2 octaves above the bassoon.

So which recorder are they talking about? Is it the treble? Would fingering a C play F???? (This is why I stick to the flute!!!)

What is the range of the piece?

If it doesn't specify I'd imagine treble, but I could be wrong, and the piece may have been transposed.

No, it isn't a transposing instrument - playing a C would produce a C - but the C on a treble is made in the "F instrument way" ie basic C is thumb and 3 fingers.

Bassoon is (I THINK) an F instrument.

With a daughter talking to me at the same time I'm not sure I understand the first bit of what you say (will think about it when she has gone to bed).

But yes the same fingering will produce a C on the descant and an F on the treble. The treble music is written as an F so it is not a transposing instrument.

Have a look at the lowest note of your sonata. A treble recorder only goes down to the F above middle C. A descant will go down to middle C (sounding an octave above).

On a related note, I have just decided to learn a Vivaldi sonata on he treble as well as the oboe, so perhaps we can swap experiences at a later stage.

The Telemann F minor in the Barenreiter (HM) edition is a treble recorder sonata. If you haven't played one before, sags_3, then it's likely to take you some time (several months) to get used to the F fingerings, and the F minor is one of the hardest in that particular collection. I'm not sure the effort involved would be worth it.

Sorry I should have made that more clear, what I meant is does the fingering for C on a flute (all holes closed) sound an F on the treble? Its not transposing, so if the first note is a C then would you have the first 3 fingers down???

Lowest note is G and highest note is top G (4 ledger lines)

swapping experiences sounds good! I have a bad feeling im going to get confused with fingerings!!!

Yes, that's right.

Yes.


Andante is in the know, but for future ref, that's a good test - if the range doesn't fall below F then there's a fair chance it was written for treble.

Yep Im playing that edition.....In that case which key is the easiest to play in? The other sonatas are in F major, Bb major and C major. Think Ill have a go at playing the recorder anyway even if not for helping interpretation!
Maybe I could write the whole thing out with descant fingerings....?!

The F major (especially the first movement) is a very popular recorder sonata. The C major is also good to play, especially if you've ever played it on the flute - much easier on the treble. Both are nice easy keys to play in. I don't know the Bb major very well - it's the only one that hasn't appeared on a flute syllabus in thae last 12 years!

The treble recorder is OK up to two sharps or three flats; after that the fingerings get a bit awkward.

Seems like a lot of work for a small return, and although the treble fingerings are alien, in some ways it's better than fingerings which are almost-but-not-quite-the-same as flute. (plus it's a shame to handicap yourself from playing the treble properly in the future)

Are descant and treble fingerings the same? If so writing it out for the descant fingerings wouldnt be that much work, Im quite quick on Sibelius!

I might try the F or C sonata when I get my recorder......just need to know which one to buy now! Thinking of entering the novice recorder competition at the local music festival. The requirements are having lessons for less than 2 years, or in my case 2 months with no lessons!

The same bar being a 5th or 4th (depending how you look at it)

If you want to learn treble "properly" at some point though, I personally wouldn't recommend it, as you're just reinforcing fingerings that would have to be unlearned. No idea what key it would end up in either

eek! Right.....not looking good.....will get one and see how things work out, not quite sure how diffult it will be playing with treble fingerings when I keep trying to play flute fingerings, but we will see!

I would just like to point out that recorders, though regarded as transposing instruments (well F ones at least), they do NOT transpose in the same way as say a clarinet does. You could play any C music on recorder, it probably just wouldn't fit into the range of one or another. The same fingerings will give you different notes on different recorders

I think if you are going to keep thinking of your flute and then trying in yur head to work out the fingerings then you will make things difficult. Of course I'm no musician but my youngest who plays both recorders and flute says she finds it best to think of them as seperate instruments.

As someone has suggested a plastic Recorder would be a good place to start and many people have spoken well of the Yam 300 series, our is an aulos that we got cheap from ebay.

By whom?

They're not transposing instruments, that's why you need to learn a new set of fingerings.


Not that I am much of a recorder player, but I agree - one of the reasons that I find treble easier, I think.

The descant and bass are transposing instruments - just the transposition interval is an octave.

At one stage in the past, at least one publisher (Peters, I think) did treat it as a transposing instrument and published Telemann sonatas with two copies of the the recorder parts - one for ordinary treble and the other to be played on a treble using C fingering...

W

Isn't bass written in bass clef? I had always assumed this was to avoid transposition - or is writing it in bass optional? My mistake, never had opportunity to play bass.

True enough about descant, (and the tinier ones maybe?) though often the music is written with the relevant modified clef to make it a non-transposing instrument.

They're not generally regarded as transposing instruments though, and certainly are not in the manner Chris seems to be implying when he says that it's the F ones that are.

that must have been horribly confusing

(says Katyjay who spent half the afternoon trying to play scales and slipping in the occasional descant fingering on the treble - and then wondering why it sounded odd.....)



Bass recorder is written in bass clef, but sounds an octave higher.

Have come back to the discussion having put daughters to bed

I learnt the recorder years ago (so long ago I don't remember learning it ) and never had any trouble swapping from C to F recorders and back. The only thing I have ever had problems with is swapping from oboe to flute and that was only with one note, the F flute fingering gives an F# on the oboe.

Yesterday I sight-read on the treble the Vivaldi sonata that I have been working on on the oboe for the past month or so. The fingering was a bit fuzzy at times and definitely needs to be worked on but it did open a completely new perspective on articulation and tonguing and I realised that I approach the two instruments totally differently; with the oboe I tend to slur everything and consciously add detached notes later, with the recorder I realised that I was spontaneously playing almost everything detached, despite having slurs pencilled in on the music.

Like the others I don't think it would be a good idea to rewrite it for a descant recorder. After all even if you get a C by putting all your fingers down, most of the fingerings are not exactly the same as on the flute, (the forked F and the B flat come to mind immediately, as does the use of the pinched thumb, not to mention the cross fingerings for the highest notes) so you might as well just learn them properly on the treble. In my opinion the treble has a much nicer sound anyway as it is more mellow and there is loads of music for the treble should you wish to pursue it.

Hideous


I don't do scales on the recorder with the differences between flute and C-recorder fingerings, and then the fact I mainly play treble... euch, it's all too horrible.


Ahh my mistake on that front.


100% agree with this

Presumably the tiny ones are effectively transposing instruments too?

Descant - most of my descant music has the relevant modified clef to say it's up an octave so effectively it isn't transposing.

The F instruments certainly aren't transposing by virtue of being F instruments, the very fact they ARE F instruments is due to the different fingering.

Yes, the tiny ones are transposing too.

When I used to teach in a secondary school I foolishly offered to play the treble in a recorder group (which only had descants). To my horror I discovered that all the parts for treble were written using a C fingering and I found I just couldn't do it. My brain refused to accept that the instrument in my hands was anything other than a treble. Quite why this should be so I don't know as I can quite happily play a descant and a tenor (from a descant or tenor part of course ).

At the first Market Harborough meet, there was one work that we ran out of "C" parts and Willobie and I took "F" parts and played them on a viola and treble recorder respectively using the violin and descant fingerings.

Willobie is brilliant, so she probably didn't have trouble with it. I found myself unable to cope with fingers and ears not being in agreement, so ended up doing a running transposition and hoping that I wasn't making too much of a mess.....

Probably something to do with the size and feel of the instrument in your hands, your brain just KNEW it was an F instrument. Friend of mine has a similar problem, (this could also be your problem if your sense of pitch is good) we have worked out she has a sort of latent perfect pitch - she doesn't really have it, in terms of being able to spontaneously produce a note or name a note, but she is very uncomfortable singing or playing in one key if the music says another: so, for example, she finds it confusing if the pianist transposes the part for pieces we sing for choir, and she can't play an F instrument if the music is for a C instrument and vice versa... eeek that sounds totally confusing. What I mean is: she basically struggles with the F fingering and rarely plays treble - I got her to try and play something on a treble recorder that was written for a C recorder, and she found that the note coming out of the instrument being different from the note on the page was impossible to deal with.

katyjay: argh, horrible for someone with perfect pitch!

I don't think my sense of pitch is that good (I certainly haven't got perfect pitch) and used to be able to transpose at sight on the piano. Treble is my favourite recorder so it certainly wasn't a question of not being used to playing it, in fact I think this was probably the problem. I was so used to playing it properly and associating a note with a fingering that I couldn't change it.


And when we split into groups I played a bassoon part on the oboe, reading the bass clef and transposing up a couple of octaves. This was an interesting experience too. Once I had worked out the starting note I could keep going but got lost when I had to jump half a page back to the beginning for a Da capo al fine. I think I must have been reading intervals rather than notes.

I can play C fingerings on treble, but do find it slightly uncomfortable.

Yes, that's what I mean when I say your brain just knew it was a treble.

I think I can do C fingerings on treble, probably more likely to do F fingerings on descant, I suspect for a similar sort of reason in that I don't play (either) very much, and am not especially used to the feel/associating a note with a fingering. (Plus I don't have the latent PP my friend has so don't have that problem either)

Haven't tried to do C fingerings on a treble for a while though, might find it more confusing now that I play sporadically.

I played descant and treble when I did my exams. I preferred descant as it has the same fingerings as a flute and they dont sound bad at all if you have a decent recorder availiable. The Treble is lovely and mellow I must admit and usually things written for treble are usually interchangable with the flute and vice versa. The descant is the piccolo of the flutes - pitched at one octave higher than written, and I dont want to even talk about sopraninos...
As for makes - I would always say Moeck which is what my first 'proper' recorders were and I still have them. They are both maple and I also have a rosewood descant. They are both Rottenburgh I forget the names. But the maple descant was just over £100 which isn't bad at all. They do take a long time to warm up though and I often revert back to plastic if I cant get in tune with the piano quickly enough for a quick practice.

I'll get my coat

That's me confused so I'll join you!

hi i was thinking maybe i should start to learn recorder too but now i am conused does the descant have the same fingering as a flute if not which does as this is what i shall buy

NO recorder out of the usual suspects (and none at all as far as I'm aware) has the same fingering as a flute, descant has a similar fingering to the flute.

Thats what I meant.