Bass Clarinet Fingering Chart

The bass clarinet: the clarinet family's bass voice

The bass clarinet is the same Boehm system stretched to roughly twice the soprano's length — a curved neck and an upturned metal bell on top of a body so long it rests on a floor peg. In the band it is the bass of the woodwind choir: it doubles the tuba and euphonium lines, underpins the clarinet section, and gets the long, dark solos nobody else can play. Most bass clarinetists start as clarinetists and double, which works precisely because the keywork is the same system — your soprano fingerings transfer, and the work is in the air (much more of it), the bigger stretches, and the extra keys at the bottom.

The low E♭ key — the one key the soprano does not have

A soprano clarinet stops at written E3. A bass clarinet keeps going one note lower, to E♭3, on an extension key: a long lever running down the lower joint to an extra pad below the E hole. The Woodwind Fingering Guide's scheme page puts it "below the right hand low E key", and your right pinky works it — it is drawn as the wide "Low E♭" key at the bottom of every diagram on these pages, and the E♭3 note page walks through it step by step. Yamaha's standard student bass clarinet (YCL-221II) is specified "range: to low E♭", and school band parts are written assuming exactly that bottom note. A few professional models add a second, thumb-operated touch for the same note — a convenience, not a different fingering.

Low-C models: three more notes, honestly labelled

Professional bass clarinets from Buffet, Selmer and Yamaha's custom line extend to written low C, adding D3, C♯3 and C3 below E♭3. Those notes are played with further extension keys — commonly a set of right-thumb keys, though the Woodwind Fingering Guide notes the low D key can sit in either pinky stack or under the thumb depending on the model. That variation is exactly why this chart does not diagram them: a diagram drawn from one maker's layout would be wrong on another's. The pattern, though, is universal — keep all six finger holes covered and add the extension key for the note you want — and if you play a low-C instrument, your maker's own chart is the right source for those three notes.

How the registers work — the same twelfth, a bigger instrument

Like the soprano, the bass clarinet overblows to the twelfth, not the octave: add the register key to a chalumeau fingering and the note jumps a twelfth into the clarion register. Low E3's fingering plus the register key is B4; the throat tones (G4 to B♭4) sit between the registers with almost no fingers down; and the famous break between B♭4 and B4 is crossed exactly as on the soprano. Two things feel different: the keys are larger and travel further, so finger movements need to be deliberate rather than fast at first, and the pinky levers are long — the low E♭, E, F and F♯ keys are worked with a flatter, stronger pinky than the soprano asks for. Above C6, the bass clarinet's altissimo fingerings diverge from the soprano's more than the lower registers do and vary by model; the standard references chart them separately, and this chart stops at C6 rather than guess at them.

A sensible way to practise from this chart

If you are doubling from soprano clarinet, start at the bottom: play the chalumeau register slowly and learn the low E♭ key's weight — it is the one genuinely new movement. Keep the instrument's peg adjusted so the mouthpiece comes to you; bass clarinet embouchure problems are usually posture problems. Then work up through the throat tones and across the break at half speed. The low notes need a great deal of slow air: if E♭3 or E3 will not speak, the cause is almost always a pinky pad not quite sealing, not the fingering.

Sources

Every fingering in this bass clarinet fingering chart was checked against two independent references. The first is Yamaha's official clarinet fingering chart (Musical Instrument Guide) — the Boehm chart Yamaha publishes for the clarinet family, whose fingerings the second source states in terms apply to bass clarinets. The second is the Woodwind Fingering Guide: its dedicated fingering chart for Boehm-system alto, bass and contrabass clarinets (the source of the low E♭ fingering and the bass chalumeau confirmations), its basic clarinet charts — headed "these fingerings are the same on all sizes of Boehm-system clarinets unless specified otherwise" — and its fingering scheme page, which locates the low E♭ key below the right-hand low E key, exactly where the diagrams on this site draw it. On the handful of notes where the sources present different standard fingerings — E♭4 and B♭5 are the classic examples — the chart shows one as the main fingering and the other as the alternate, so nothing is hidden.

Bass clarinet fingering questions