Bassoon Fingering Chart

The bassoon: two and a half metres of tube, folded in half

The bassoon is the bass voice of the woodwind family — the instrument that plays the grandfather in Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, grumbling away under the strings. Its sound comes from a double reed, like the oboe’s but bigger, on the end of a long conical tube. Unfolded, that tube runs to about two and a half metres; the instrument stays playable because the bore doubles back on itself in the boot joint at the bottom, so the air travels down one bore and back up the other. That fold is the reason for everything complicated about the bassoon’s fingering: the far end of the instrument — its lowest notes — sits right under the player’s thumbs, and the thumbs inherit a cluster of keys each.

Concert pitch: what you read is what you hear

Most of the instruments on this site transpose: the clarinet sounds a whole step below its written notes, the bass clarinet a major ninth below. The bassoon does not. It reads at concert pitch, mostly in the bass clef — high passages move into the tenor clef, but still at pitch — so written B♭2 sounds as concert B♭2, and the "Sounds as" column in the chart simply repeats the written note. When the conductor asks the bassoon for a concert pitch, the bassoonist plays the note with that exact name.

The whisper key: a vent, not a register key

New bassoonists usually arrive from the clarinet or the oboe expecting one key to change the register for them. The bassoon refuses to work that way. Its nearest equivalent is the whisper key: a small vent under the left thumb, held down for most notes from E2 through the second octave, which helps those notes speak cleanly and in tune. But it does not choose the register — the fingering does that, with the whisper key, the flick keys, the partial holes and the player’s air all playing their parts. That is why two bassoon notes a semitone apart can have surprisingly different fingerings, and why the low octave’s fingerings mostly drop the whisper key again below E2 while the third octave lets it go almost everywhere — only G4 keeps it in this chart.

Flick keys: the tap that starts the note

The notes from A3 upward have a starting problem: fingered plainly, they tend to crack or grunt as they begin. The bassoon’s answer is the flick keys — three small vents under the left thumb, named D, B and A for the notes they serve. For A3, B♭3, B3 and C4 you flick the matching key — touch it exactly as the note starts, then let it go while the note keeps sounding. The flick is a momentary vent, not part of the held fingering, and the diagrams on this site draw that honestly: a flicked key is dashed, while a key you hold is filled. Higher up the flick keys change jobs: on A4 and B♭4 the A flick key is held down for the whole note as part of the fingering itself, and there it is drawn filled like any other key. Learning to flick — a tap from the thumb that is already hovering over the cluster — is the technique that makes the bassoon’s middle register stop sounding effortful.

Ten fingers, and the busiest thumb in the band

Every instrument on this site leaves at least one finger with little to do — except the bassoon. All ten fingers work, and the left thumb works hardest of all: in the fingerings on this page it operates nine keys — the whisper key, the C♯ key, the three flick keys and the four big low keys (B♭, B, C and D) that lengthen the instrument for its lowest notes. Yamaha’s own guide counts at least ten keys for that thumb on a fully equipped instrument, once extras such as a whisper-key lock are fitted. The right thumb has its own smaller cluster of four keys on the boot joint. Add the left pinky’s E♭ and C♯ keys — drawn as two separate keys in these diagrams, because on the instrument they are two, however some charts merge them into one shape — the right pinky’s three keys, and the narrow sliver B♭ key hiding between the right hand’s second and third holes, and the bassoon diagram becomes the largest on this site by a distance. It has to be: it is the only honest way to draw this instrument.

Why the bassoon is not just a big oboe

The bassoon and oboe are both double-reed instruments, and there the resemblance ends. The oboe changes register with a half-hole and two octave keys; the clarinet overblows a twelfth with one register key. The bassoon has no such single mechanism — its register changes are built note by note out of fingering choice, the whisper vent, the flick vents and partial coverage of the first hole (a quarter, a half or three quarters open, marked on the F♯3, G3, G♯3, G4 and G♯4 pages). Its third finger closes a ring key rather than a plain hole. And where the clarinet family transposes, the bassoon reads at concert pitch. Treat it as its own system, learned on its own terms, and its charts stop looking arbitrary: nearly every fingering here is a neighbour’s fingering with one vent changed.

Two systems: Heckel and Buffet

This chart is for the Heckel (German) system — the bassoon the world’s schools, conservatoires and orchestras actually use, from Yamaha’s and Fox’s student models upward. A second system, Buffet (French), survives mainly in France, with different keywork, a different bore and genuinely different fingerings. Nothing on this page should be carried across to a Buffet instrument; if you play one, you need its own charts, and your teacher is the right source for them.

A sensible way to practise from this chart

Start in the low octave and learn the left thumb’s geography as a skill in itself: the four low keys letting go one at a time across B♭1 to D2 is the first lesson the instrument teaches. Add the whisper key from E2 and notice that it stays with you for an octave and a half. When you reach the second octave, practise the flick on its own — finger A3, tap the A flick key as the note starts, and feel the attack clean up — and tune the three partial-hole notes (F♯3, G3, G♯3) against a tuner until the fractions are in your finger, not just on the page. Low bassoon notes fail from leaks and tired reeds before they fail from fingers: if the bottom octave will not speak, check the pads and the reed before you check the chart.

Sources

Every fingering in this bassoon fingering chart was checked against three independent references before publishing, because the bassoon’s keywork is complicated enough that any single chart can mislead. The first is Yamaha’s official Musical Instrument Guide bassoon fingering chart — its per-note diagrams, read key by key against the chart’s own numbered key schematic. The second is the Woodwind Fingering Guide’s bassoon fingering charts, the specialist woodwind reference, whose fingering scheme spells out the thumb keys, the flick keys and the partial first-hole fingerings in words. The third is the First 5 Notes bassoon fingering chart, an independent published chart covering exactly this B♭1–B♭4 range. On most notes all three agree exactly. Where they divide — the exact span of the whisper key in the low octave, and E♭3, for which the references print three different fingerings — the fingering two of the three share is the one published as the main fingering, the runner-up is shown as the alternate, and the disagreement is recorded here rather than hidden. Yamaha also publishes a bassoon fingering PDF, but its text layer carries no readable fingering data, so the Guide’s chart diagrams are the Yamaha evidence used. (The NoteAtlas site, used elsewhere on this site, publishes no bassoon chart.)

Bassoon fingering questions