Woodwind Fingerings
LeaderboardWork register by register. Alternate fingerings are accepted everywhere.
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Work register by register. Alternate fingerings are accepted everywhere.
Fingering drills for clarinet, flute, and alto saxophone — see a written note, build the fingering, and get it checked. Ranges are written pitch, as they appear on the part in front of you.
A woodwind fingering is a chord of decisions: which holes are covered, which keys are pressed, whether a register or octave key is engaged. Fluency means the whole shape arrives at once when you see the note, not finger by finger, and it is the thing that separates a player who knows the notes from a player who can play them.
The notes here are written pitch rather than sounding pitch, because written pitch is what appears on your part. The B♭ clarinet and the alto saxophone are both transposing instruments — the clarinet sounds a major second below what is written, the alto sax a major sixth below — so a written C is a different concert pitch on each. The flute is not a transposing instrument, and its written notes are the notes it sounds.
The clarinet ladders are split the way the instrument is: the chalumeau register at the bottom, the throat tones in the awkward middle where the tone thins and the fingerings stop following the pattern, and the clarion above the break, where the register key reuses the low fingerings a twelfth higher. That reuse is the reason the clarinet rewards this kind of drilling more than most instruments — learning the bottom register twice buys you the top one.
The saxophone ladder covers the low stack across the octave break, and the flute ladder runs the first octave with the E♭ pinky key doing its quiet, constant work.
Work in register blocks rather than straight up the range. Fingerings are learned as neighbourhoods, and a note is easiest to place when the notes either side of it are already secure.
Say the note name as you build the fingering. Tying the name to the shape is what makes the shape available when you are reading, which is the situation it has to work in.
Spend disproportionate time on the transitions — the clarinet's break, the saxophone's octave change. Those are where fingerings change most and where hesitation costs most, and they are chronically under-practised precisely because they are unpleasant.