A flat or G # on a Clarinet

I enjoy the A clarinet much more than the Bb. It’s darker, slightly nasal and honky, but somehow feels melancholic to me.

What I came in to say though, fingerings aside for a moment, is the CONTEXT of what note you are playing is of dire importance in terms of where you want to aim the pitch to make it sound ‘in tune’. Let’s stick to G#. If the chord you are playing has G# as a root (G# Major, minor, etc), you probably want to play as ‘dead center’ as you can with respect to the pitch of the ensemble. If the chord is E Major, then G# is acting as the Major third of the chord and you want to play it very flat, otherwise it will sound out of tune and you will hear a buzzing or pulsation. The major third is probably the chord memeber requiring the most adjustment, but it is always important to know what part of the chord you are playing, not only for intonation but also for balance.

What member of the chord you analyze the note you are playing to be is dependent almost entirely on it’s ‘spelling’- wether the composer chose to write (in this case) G# or Ab. This will be true for most music clear into the twentieth century.

This is just one reason why theory and analysis skills are very important, which a lot of musicians seem to overlook.

The ‘throat tone’ G# which lies on the second line of the staff has about a zillion combinatorial possibilities if you consider ‘venting’ or covering a combination of the open holes on your right hand and maybe the last two of your left. I choose this combination based on intonation and tone colour. Compensating partially with the embechoure, the shape/size of oral cavity and the fingers helps you in trying to keep a consistent sound across the instrument, I think.

Bamboo, thanks for a very informative post.

I’ve played violin/viola for sixteen years. I understand different tunings and different ratios, but I read the OP’s question as wondering if there was a pitch difference between a Ab and G#.

There’s NOT. Ab = G#. It’s the EXACT SAME PITCH The different tuning ratios come not from the notation but from the scale degrees.

What am I missing here?

See my link earlier. Despite what basic music theory says, not everything is played in equal temperament.

And they use Ab or G# to notate that?

No - enharmonic equivalents indicate the role a note has within the harmony. What implications there are for intonation depends on this, on the melodic direction (A-G#-A, in A minor, begs for a rather high G#), and on the instrumentation. If a piano or other inflexible instrument is involved, there’s less room for change, Bamboo Boy mentioned the need for wind chords to use major 3rds closer to ‘true’ ratios, while the opposite is true with strings, where rather wide intervals can add a richness to the timbre. (FWIW, an exact equal temperament major 3rd, played on a signal generator, sounds hideous!)