Woodwind Section

• Not all woodwinds are made out of wood! ...
• Up until 1770 the Oboe was called the hoboy.
• Clarinet player Adolphe Sax invented the saxophone in 1846.
• The lowest notes in the symphony are played by the large contrabassoon.
• The flute is the oldest instrument in the world to play notes.

Bassoon

The bassoon is a woodwind instrument and has a double reed which is 2 pieces of bamboo attached together and when you blow it vibrates. You put the reed onto a metal pipe which is called a crook and the air goes in, down and up again. It has a very large range and you can play very low and also very high and then everything in between. You can make your reeds your self but you could make heaps and have none that work which is very annoying. The bamboo that the reed is made out of comes from France. The bassoon is quite often in unison with the clarinet and most of the time you will be the bottom of the chord if all the woodwind is playing. A bassoon looks like this.

Clarinet

The clarinet is basically just a cylindrical tube with finger holes so when you take more fingers of the instrument the pitch will rise. There are also metal keys so you can play all the notes in between (the chromatic notes). Some of that metal work is to play trills rapidly and efficiently. In order so you don't have to have a case a long as the clarinet, the instrument takes apart in 5 parts. The bowel, the middle (lower and upper) and then at the very top a barrel. You also have a mouthpiece which the reed sits on. A clarinet looks like this.

Flute/Piccolo

The flute is a member of the woodwind family but differs from the other winds because it doesn't have a reed and you make the sound by blowing across a hole at the top. The highest not on the flute is a 3rd octave A and the lowest note is a -1 octave C ( 1 octave below middle C). The flute used to be wooden but then a envious (because another really good player made his flute louder by making the holes, there were no keys, bigger) flute player decided to change the flute and make it metal so that it would make a louder and brighter sound. The piccolo is the same as the flute just sounded 1 octave higher and is smaller. The word piccolo in Italian means small.

Oboe

The oboe first started in the middle ages and then got a lot more developed into modern oboe. Most modern oboes make their own reeds, and to make a reed you start of with a tube of cane (a bit like bamboo) which you split into 3 pieces. You then do a process called gouging which makes it thinner and then you shape it. The oboe can part into 3 sections. The top joint, the middle joint and the bowel. The modern oboe has 46 pieces of key work including trill keys and octave keys. It looks like this.