Rubank Elementary Method – Clarinet by Nilo W. Hovey Concert Band Methods - Sheet Music

Lawrence S.

Solid bare-bones method book

This is a solid introduction, with lots of well-planned exercises to build up musicianship and familiarity with the clarinet fingering system. The thing to be aware of it is that it's an old-fashioned method book (published in 1933) and contains very little instruction, just exercises to play through, and occasionally a single indication of how to play a new note. If you're an experienced musician and have some background in woodwinds, you could use it as a decent self-study method as long as you have some other source of information (YouTube?) on things like embouchure and managing reeds and such. In fact, I'd recommend it for exactly that audience, because you won't have to wade through sections on what a quarter note is or how time signatures work.

It would also be a perfectly good method book for a novice instrumentalist whose teacher is ready to do most of the work of teaching basic musicianship, including reading. This is, I think, its originally intended purpose.

A few things to be aware of:

1. Keyed fingerings are described using a series of numbers and letters that are tied to a single chart of a Bohm system clarinet at the beginning of the book. If that's too confusing, and you really want a fully visual guide to fingering, you'll want one of the more modern method books.

2. If you are unfamiliar with the concept of alternate fingerings, you'll just have to scratch your head until you figure it out. The fingering chart at the beginning of the book presents two different fingerings for written low E, but the first time that note appears in the book, it is presented with a fingering different from either of those. All three fingerings are correct and useful in different circumstances, but the book never bothers to explain this.

Nero

best starter...

I'm old school. I used this method to learn French horn in Jr/Sr High School. I've used it througho.ut my life with many different instruments that are suppoerted by the Rubank method. Slow and thorough wins the day. 'Can't go wrong with this series of tutors

Anonymous

5 star

Excellent service and received product in a very timely manner.

Rose

clarinet book

We never received this item, although it was supposedly sent twice. Very disappointed, wouldn't order again.