I have been playing the Alto Sax for around two years, and recently started to play the clarinet - I am working my way through 'learn as you play Clarinet, and have got as far as starting to use the thumb key.
The exercise in the book says to play middle C then press the thumb key to get high G, low bflat for high f etc. I can play the lower register notes no problem and without effort, but I am really struggling to get the higher notes. How easy are these to sound normally? I am wondering if its a leaky clarinet or if its just my inexperience causing the problems

Cheers
Chad

Immediate thought : any exposure of the thumb hole when pressing the register key will cause you problems. The hole needs to be completely covered as well.

Hi,

Yes I'm fairly sure the thumb hole is closed as I press the thumb key even if it is a bit of a contortion. I have even tried playing C normally and then getting my wife to press the thumb key so that I dont spoil the seal on the thumb hole !!! Still no good - all I get is a high pitched skronk


Thanks
Chad

Contortion? Describing it like that is worrying. You shouldn't find it a contortion to open the register key. You should be able to just flex your thumb a little to sort of 'tip' the register key open. There shouldn't be any big movements or contortions involved! The only thing you might describe as a contortion would be the 'pinch' to get throat Bb with the A and register keys, but you're not doing that anyway.

Are you sure you're not opening any other keys slightly by accident? I went through a phase of accidentally opening the G# key slightly with my left index finger when I was learning to cross the break.

The relative difficulty of upper and lower registers is really different with sax and clarinet.

I played clarinet as a child and remember all the going over the break problems. When I started on sax that was a doddle, but getting the low notes to speak was much more problematic.

If you're playing the clarinet as though it's a sax, with the same enbouchure you'll run into all kinds of problems. Although they're both single reed instruments there are fundamental differences in the way you play them. It's complicated by the fact that to start with you can play a sax as though as it's a clarinet and probably the other way round, but to a lesser extent, and make relatively quick progress, but in the end you can't make any decent headway unless you treat them as completely different instruments.

I've made the decision that as long as my music time is limited by the constraints of a full time job I'm going to stick to trying to play sax as well as I possibly can, and specifically tenor sax (although alto gets an occasional outing).