In this segment we will be looking at woodwind
instruments. So, as we look at them you'll see that some of them aren't made of wood
at all. So, what's the deal?
Well, except for the saxophone, which is a relatively new invention, and was never
made out of wood,
almost everything that you will see was at one time a wooden instrument.
The flute we have changed over time and we even have metal flutes, although you
can also buy a wooden flute if you like.
It has a different kind of sound. As orchestras got bigger and we wanted
brighter sounds than the
metal flute can be a more piercing kind of sound.
We've had some changes like that. We also won't see
the same sort of consistency in how the sound is produced that we've seen in our
other families.
When we look at brass instruments we know that the buzzing of the lips
creates a sound. String instruments;
the bow on the string or the plucking on the string creates a sound. Percussion
instruments; you hit something and something happens.
With the woodwinds we have a lot more variety. So, I'm not
a woodwind player. I can sort of play and I will try to demonstrate a few
things for you but that's why we'll also give you
YouTube videos of professionals so you can know what the instrument is supposed
to sound like,
as opposed to what it sounds like when I play. So let's start with
the flute. The flute is the highest pitched, well it's not the highest pitch. I'll take that
back because
it's got a little baby brother and that's even a higher
pitch. But it's the highest pitched of the
things that you would see most of the time. So as you can see it's not made of wood.
No wood anywhere in sight. Has lots of keys.
Remember all our brass instruments had either three or four valves
or a slide. Pretty minimal
mechanical things to go wrong with a brass instrument, short of dropping it on
the floor and bending it in half,
you really can't hurt it very much. Woodwind instruments are very fragile.
They have lots of keys as you can see all these are keys. And there are lots
of
these things that we call rods. So,
those are bendable. So if you grab it wrong you can bend that and break it.
There are also lots of little springs and the if the springs pop loose.... there are just a lot of
things that can go wrong with a woodwind instrument. So
you'll see that they are very, very careful with their instruments.
This particular flute, if you can see, some of the holes have holes
and some of them are covered. And that's not unusual on any woodwind
instrument.
It has a lot to do with what has to push down things. Some
keys actually push down two. As you can see that one, one key pushing
down covers two holes. So obviously I can only have one finger
there
so the other one's got to do it for itself. So there...
if you see flutes with open holes, and not open holes there is really no
difference.
Flutists can sometimes adjust the pitch a little bit if the holes open by moving
their finger a bit.
So we call this the foot and then we have the body of the flute and then we have
the mouthpiece or the head joint as they call it on the flute. So how does it make a sound?
You waste a lot of air, to be quite honest.
To play the flute, to produce a sound on the flute, we can do this without the
instrument.
It's basically... the physics of it is splitting a column of air,
so that splitting of the air is what causes vibration. So we have a hole in
the mouthpiece and basically you're sort of blowing
across it and and into it at the same time.
(demonstrates playing)
So you can see that I can create a sound with just the mouthpiece
and that's true of many, many different things that we have seen.
So we add the flute back to it. It's held
sideways (blowing into flute).
As I said, that's why we have professionals on the recordings for you (blowing into flute).
Makes me very light-headed because there is so much air that gets wasted.
But, so it's played off to the side, it is the only woodwind instrument that is
played horizontally. So that will be easy to tell in the orchestra.
This little instrument is
related to the flute. This is the piccolo. Piccolos
can be sometimes like this. This one is made out of wood.
I think it's grenadilla wood or something like that, a black wood.
But they're also made out of metal so you may see piccolos that look just like a flute
except very tiny.
If you look at the size comparatively, the piccolo is about half the size
of a flute.
So what we know about physics of sound, if it's half the size that
means it's going to sound an octave
higher. So the flute is an octave lower than piccolo, and a piccolo
is an octave higher. Let me see if I can get a sound out of this (playing piccolo).
And you can see that was kind of low because I'm not a very good piccolo player.
Piccolo is very hard to play. As you can see everything's very close together.
You have to get all your fingers in this little tiny space.
So, very minimal movement.
People with big hands have a hard time playing a piccolo. So, those are the two
woodwind instruments that don't have wood anywhere involved, unless the piccolo
happens to be made of wood. Let's move now to
the double reed instrument.
This is an oboe.
The way that you can tell an oboe when you see it in the orchestra or in the band is
to look at the bottom. Because you can see it is sort of rounded and has kind of an
onion shape at the bottom. That's going to be different from the clarinet that we'll look at in
just a minute. Then I'll put them side-by-side so you can see.
So that's the first place you should look to see
whether it's an oboe or a clarinet. The other place to look
is on the other end at the top.
This is where the mouthpiece goes.
So, for an oboe, there's not a mouthpiece that you stick on,
there's just the reed. So we call it the double reed
because it is in fact a double reed. There are two reeds
tied together.
Wound together with a bunch of string/wire, lots of
different things that people use.
Then, it's all put into a cork and then the whole thing sits into the oboe.
So the instrument's here and then you basically have your mouthpiece over here.
So the oboe and all the other double reed instruments
because it has this double reed has a very different sound.
And, if we're really lucky, we'll get one my oboe reeds to work.
Oboe players are always fiddling with their reeds. Even if you watch them
during a concert you may see them
getting out little little knives and razor blades and
scraping and doing all sorts of things. Or they will have a whole box full of
reeds and it's just a really difficult
thing to do because you never know whether it's going to work. Humidity
affects
the reed. If you get the least little chip in it.
Mine are pretty badly chipped. So that's probably why they don't work very well.
They're just very temperamental. So double reed players spend a lot of time
doing what looks like construction work back there.
Go by their offices and they are all just working away. So we are going to see
if I can get a sound out of my double reed here.
So you can get a sense of the difference between it and the single reed when we
look at those.
(playing double reed)
Okay, you can see that sounds sort of like a duck call, right?
What we have here is the two reeds that are bound together. They have a little
space in between to vibrate.
And so they're vibrating against each other and that's how you get that
particular sort of,
I think of it as sort of a nasal quality to it. It's beautiful when it's on the instrument.
By itself it's not perhaps the most beautiful sound you've ever heard.
But that's what makes a double reed instrument, and the oboe is the highest
of those.
There is a middle member of the double reed family called the English
horn,
that has the same sort of mouthpiece, that is a little longer than an
oboe, and has a sort of tenor-y
quality to it. Alright, so here is
our clarinet. As I said we'll look at those together in just a minute,
but if you look at the bell of the clarinet you can see that it is really flared out.
Where the oboe had that sort of roundness on the bottom. So that's
one big clue that it's a clarinet and not an oboe. The other is to look on the other end
and you will see here that we have a mouthpiece
attached already. That it stays on. I'm going to turn this around so you can see
what we have here.
What I can see that I have here is that I have my reed on too high.
In a single reed instrument like the clarinet this is our reed. It's just a
piece of wood.
Not double, just single. So a different sound. So obviously I can't just go
and
make anything happen there. There's nothing to vibrate. Once I put that in
my mouth, it stops vibrating.
So the way that this works is that the reed is
put on the mouthpiece and
the mouthpiece, I'll give you a quick look at it here.
There's actually a hole here.
So you put the reed over that hole, the reed vibrates
over the hole and then the vibrations can go down into the
instrument.
So placement is really important, and as I said I had mine a little bit too
high there. So, let's see if we can get it back on.
There we go.
And again I can play it, whoops. I didn't get that on very well, did I? OK.
Try that again.
See, woodwinds I told you, they're just a lot of work.
There is always something that can go wrong.
If you watch woodwind players in the orchestra, you'll see that several of them have
multiple instruments that they have to play. So if you're...
if you're a flute player you probably have a flute and a piccolo sitting
at your stand. If you're a clarinet player, you may have two clarinets that, to
you and I in the audience, look exactly the same. But one is actually a
half-step different from the other and they have to keep switching back and forth.
Alright, so let's see what kind of sound we get here. (playing clarinet)
Good and loud, isn't it? That makes nice loud sounds. So,
you can see that it doesn't have that kind of edge to it that the double
reed has,
and once we put it on the instrument,
(clarinet playing)
And that's our clarinet. I am a much better clarinet player than I am a flute player,
obviously. Alright, now let me put these two together. So here we have
clarinet on this side, oboe over here.
You can see that the bottoms are different and when you get them side by
side it's really easy to see
that that the clarinet is longer,
it's also a little bit thicker. That is not quite so easy to see, maybe if I turn it around
and you can see that better.
You can see that the body itself is a little bit wider on the clarinet than it is
on the oboe,
which is part of why it has a deeper sound. Because of
the physics. They're bigger, bigger instrument, bigger sound. Also see that the
oboe appears to have lots more keys.
They can all play all the same notes but sometimes it just,
the mechanics of it require more things to push
and pull. So clarinet flared bell,
mouthpiece on the top. Oboe rounded bell
with the reed sticking out of the top. Alright, now let's take a look at some of the
bigger
woodwind instruments.
Alright, now we're going to take a look at the big
members of the woodwind family and what I have here
is the bassoon. So you can see that it's
way up there already and it goes
all the way down here. So, this is a large
instrument. It's played sitting down and
it actually has a strap that would attach to it that, if I had one, I would be
sitting on
so that I don't spend all my time trying to support this instrument because it's
large, it's very heavy, and it's unbalanced, so it wants to go
away from me. So you will see bassoonists sit down and you will see them adjusting things
underneath themselves. That's where they're trying to keep their instrument
on their body with them. So, here's our mouthpiece.
I don't actually have a bassoon reed so I can't stick one on there for you but
this is called the bocal.
And the reed would attach here in much the same way that the
double reed attaches to the oboe where we just sort of
stick it in the end. So here's our bocal and the place the mouthpiece would go.
So, we would play it like this.
So as you look at the front of the instrument,
you can see that there really aren't a lot of things on the front.
I've got a few places here to put my fingers. If my hands were larger I could
probably do this better.
I stretch them out
and there are my hands.You can notice right away how how big it is because on all
the other instruments my hands were close together like this. Now
they are stretched all
over the place. But not a lot of keys on the front. Remember
all the others instruments we looked at were just covered with keys. That's because
most of the keys are actually on the back
of the bassoon. So, you can see that there are lots
of things to operate back here. And, these are all done
with the thumbs. So a bassoonist has to really be
flexible with their thumbs. They have to play a whole lot of keys here, whole lot of keys here,
so if you're watching them play in the orchestra, you may not see much action
happening here but you can bet there's a lot of action happening on the back side
of the instrument.
So this is the bassoon. It's not even the biggest of the double reed instruments.
There is a contra bassoon and I think there's even a contra bass bassoon so they
can get really, really big.
If you see somebody in the orchestra who's
physically towering above the rest of the orchestra because they are having to
sit on a stool,
that's probably one of those contra bassoon kinds of things. Because they are so long
and I mean you can see now that this almost, doesn't hit the floor behind me but it's
pretty long.
You make it much bigger, there's no room to go. So they sit on a stool
and go way up in the air. So if you see somebody really tall you'll know they
are playing one of those
larger members of the bassoon family. So that's our lowest double reed.
We've already seen some single reeds. So now let's take a look at
the bigger single reed instrument. This is the newest member of
the woodwind family.
As I said before, it's not even made of wood. Never has been.
It's made of metal. This is the saxophone.
So, why is it a woodwind instrument? It's a woodwind because it still makes sound
the same way a clarinet does. It has a single reed on a mouthpiece.
This is vibrating and that's where our sound comes from. So that's why we
call it a woodwind and not a brass.
So as we look at the saxophone, we can see
that it's got a very large bell, compared to the other instruments we've seen.
As we look at it this way we can see that there are a lot of keys
but none of them have open holes over them like we saw on the clarinet or oboe or even on
the bassoon.
They all have some sort of a large cover on it. That's because the hole itself
underneath that is so huge you could never cover it with your finger.
So, all the saxophones have pads like that that will cover
the holes on the instrument. So
you're not going to hear the saxophone in
orchestral music very much. It's a fairly modern invention, comes
around in the late
1800's. It hasn't really kind of worked its way into the orchestra.
It's used for special effects. In the
Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, there's a movement
where there's a saxophone solo. So the poor saxophone player has to sit there
on the stage for the entire
long piece just to play their one little movement where they have the big starring
moment.
Saxophones, like all, almost all, woodwind instruments
come in multiple sizes. So we would have a smaller one, which is the instrument
Kenny G
plays as the soprano saxophones, kind of looks like a
metal clarinet. It doesn't have this kind a bell-shaped normally.
We have the Alto which is this size. Then we have the tenor,
which is a little bigger, and the baritone and then we have the bass.
So you can see that we're using those vocal ranges as our defining things to
tell us what kind of range the instrument is in.
We also have the same kind of size differential
in the clarinet. So we have the
little tiny E-flat clarinet, we have the B-flat clarinet, which is the one that you
have seen.
We have the alto clarinet, we have bass clarinet, and we even have a contra bass clarinet.
So these instruments come in different sizes which is nice because then they
can play in choirs. You could have a whole choir full of clarinets that would go from soprano
right down to bass and you could play, you know, pretty much anything because you
have got all the the voice parts covered.
So now that you know what all the instruments look like, go to YouTube and
watch the videos so you can hear what they all sound like and really get a
sense of what those instruments,
how to distinguish them one from another so that when you're listening to big
pieces later,
you'll be able to pick them out.