When Scott McLaughlin and Mic Spencer were last here working on our composer-composer-performer project, the lure of the contra sitting in the other room proved to be too much to resist (honestly that’s why I keep it out so much of the time, heh.). Scott and I spent an hour or two experimenting with some multiphonics, and I thought I’d put our 15 favourites from that session up on the blog.

Update (24/11/15): there are now 26 multiphonics!

Three of these, 2, 7 and 11, I thought sounded nice with fluttertongue, so I’ve included that in the recording. You’ll hear this in the recording as well, but these pitches can not all be played simultaneously, you’ll always get the fundamental and one of the high notes. (Except where pitches are in (), those are pitches that sound but can NOT be isolated, you’ll always hear them.)

They’re all relatively soft multiphonics, some with very interesting textural properties, and all a little on the fragile side. I rather like them.

And don’t forget these are all for a Leblanc paperclip contra, so there’s no guarantee they’ll work on any other contrabass clarinet.

Everything is transposed!

Use headphones!

A few of these work and sound great when used as trills. For example:

16 trilled to a normal G fingering, and 17 trilled to a normal G fingering: 

#2 trilled to #20: 

#8 trilled to #24:

#9 trilled to #23:

#10 trilled to #21:

#19 trilled to #23:

01
02
03
04
05
06
07
08
09
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26