On the Sound and Design of Wind Instruments

Wind instruments have such an incredibly broad spectrum of sounds, and I think that’s what makes them extremely appealing to me. A clarinet player can play a nearly whatever pitch their heart desires, and then can play with an unbelievable number of different timbres.

If you just read the word “timbre” and got completely lost because you don’t speak French, fret not, as I’ll explain it to you.

Timbre is a word that’s used to describe the quality of a certain sound. For example, the sound of a French Horn playing extremely loud has a very harsh, metallic sound quality, or timbre.

“The Death Hunt”, from On Dangerous Ground, by Bernard Herrman. Listen to those muffled horns scream! You’ll be able to hear our rendition of this aggressive piece of music in Spring of 2020, on the UNLV Wind Orchestra’s newest album, entitled “Quaternity”

You can juxtapose the extremely harsh timbre of the French Horns playing loudly with the sound of a clarinet playing with a very delicate, warm, connected timbre.

Wenzel Fuchs playing Brahms’ “1st Clarinet Sonata”

While these are two extremes of the spectrum of timbre, you can see massive differences in timbre even when the same instrument is being played by different people! Take the world-famous trumpeter, Maynard Ferguson, known for his incredibly “bright”, edgy trumpet sound.

Maynard Ferguson’s blasting out some crazy high pitches in his extremely famous solo on “Gonna Fly Now”

You can juxtapose that with the timbre that someone like Miles Davis, who, while playing the exact same type of instrument, can get an incredibly mellow and dark timbre.

Miles Davis playing “Blue in Green”

Again, this is a comparison between two extremes. You can still find massive differences in sound quality between two people that are playing in the “same” manner.

You could take classical clarinetists like Wenzel Fuchs and juxtapose his timbre with that of Anthony McGill, and while they play in the same style, they both play with noticeably different sounds.

Wenzel Fuchs playing Brahms’ “2nd Clarinet Sonata”

Anthony McGill playing Brahms’ “2nd Clarinet Sonata”

You may wonder why I’ve thrown all of this information about timbre at you in a blog about engineering. The answer is that nearly everything can affect how a wind player sounds when they play an instrument, and that the variability in materials (especially wood) can drastically change someone’s sound.

By making instruments with an extremely accurate 3D printer, we can ensure that any changes we make to our CAD designs will be accurately reflected in the end product, which will vastly help us when we begin messing around with certain variables to make entire lines of instruments that will be able to fit any player, regardless of how they may want to play.

TL;DR — We’re gonna talk about “timbre” a lot when we get further in our clarinet designing adventures. Timbre is the quality of the sounds that come out of the instrument, and the sound of an instrument is arguably the most important part of any instrument.