Bass Clarinet on the Bass Clef

• Mar 17, 2017 - 15:13

I'm rather surprised that no one has asked for Bass Clarinet written on the bass clef as an instrument choice. I run into it a lot with classical music, especially from the first half of the 20th century and to a lesser extent late 19th century. I've also run into A bass Clarinets on scores as well, both in treble and bass clef notation. I have added these instruments to my instrument.xml file with these definitions

B♭ Bass Clarinet (Bass Clef)
B♭ B. Cl.
Bass Clarinet (Bass Clef)
wind.reed.clarinet.bass.bassclef
F
F
1
37-75
37-79
-8
-2

common
orchestra

A Bass Clarinet (Bass Clef)
A B. Cl.
Bass Clarinet (Bass Clef)
wind.reed.clarinet.bass.bassclef
F
F
1
36-74
36-78
-9
-3

common
orchestra

A Bass Clarinet
A B. Cl.
Bass Clarinet
wind.reed.clarinet.bass
G
G8vb
1
36-74
36-78
-9
-15

common
orchestra

I would appreciate it if they were added to the embedded instrument definitions.


Comments

I forgot the forum would reformat all of what I posted. Give me a minute and I'll put it in a file I can upload to this post.

edit: added text file with defs.

edit2: The ? on the Bb bass clarinet should be a flat sign, it didn't export to text.

Attachment Size
Bass Clarinet defs.txt 2.67 KB

In reply to by mike320

It is not about the clefs (concertClef, transposingClef), it is about the instrument ID (not sure whether spaces, uppercase and brackets cause issues there, but why take chances) and the MusicXML ID (which is supposed to be used for mapping instruments on importing MusicXML).

In reply to by Brooklynct01

You have to change the transposition as well. Not sure if the edition you are using does octave transposition, or transposition by major second, or no transposition at all, but whatever it is, you simply need to match it. Then you can enter the notes and they will be marked in range.

If you continue to have trouble, please attach your score and we can help further. But I tried it as follows and it worked perfectly using 2.1:

1) add Bass Clarinet to a score
2) change clef to bass
3) change play transposition to 0 octaves plus major second (just a guess as to what you are trying to do)
4) enter E below the staff

Result: no problems

Then I click the E and move it down a half step to Eb by pressing down arrow, still no problems. Now move it down one more half step to D and it shows as outside the range - which is completely correct for this transposition.

In reply to by mike320

Still, it's perfectly possible to get the effect in 2.1 - you just need to make the adjustments to clef and transposition.

Never having seen music for bass clef notated in this fashion, I'm confused about the expected behavior here though. From the commit message on the PR that fixed the issue, it looks like it still has the same octave and a major second transposition as the regular bass clarinet. So the lowest note you can write would be the Eb just above the center line - the center line D and everything below it would be out of range, since it actually is being transposed an octave. Is this really the intent? I thought the purpose of using bass clef would be to eliminate the octave transposition? Or am I misreading something?

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

On the Bass Clarinet (Bass Clef) there is no octave transposition, only the Major 2nd down that is expected of a Bb instrument. Not being a Bass Clarinet player, I am no expert but from examining scores I have seen written in bass clef for both Bb and A Bass Clarinets, the notations seem to be what I would expect. Perhaps a European Bass Clarinet player could comment on this, since Bass Clef notation is far more common in Europe (especially German influenced countries) than in the U.S.

In reply to by mike320

Well, in the commit for the PR in question, I see the transposition for the "Bb bass clarinet bass clef" set to diatonic -8, chromatic -2. This doesn't really make sense to me. If it's meant to only be a major second, it should be -1/-2, just like regular Bb clarinet. It works nevertheless - apparently MuseScore rejects the -8 diatonic as being incompatible with the -2 chromatic - but this should probably be fixed if the intent is for the transposition to just be a major second.

Similarly for "A Bass Clarinet Bass Clef" - I would think should be -2/-3, just like regular A clarinet, not -9/-3, which seems to imply an octave transposition as well.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

I'm not sure what the numbers before the "/" are used for. I modeled them after similar instruments that I don't remember. When I proposed the instruments.xml changes I indicated the ones I used that worked. Perhaps problems would become apparent if the user were to start using ctrl+shift+arrows vs arrows to change pitches (diatonic vs chromatic?).

In staff properties there are no octaves indicated and the pitches match what I have seen in print for the bass clarinets.

In reply to by mike320

The first number is the number of diatonic steps to transpose by, the second is the number of chromatic steps. There are two numbers because otherwise there would be no way to tell the difference between, say, Eb and D#. Eb and D# are both three chromatic steps up (from C, which of course is always the point of reference for instrument transpositions), but Eb is two diatonic steps whereas D# is only one.

So the definitions in the XML file are technically wrong, then, and should be corrected. Right now I don't see any bad effects caused by this - like I said, hopefully MuseScore detects the mismatch somewhere and corrects it internally - but better safe than sorry. Should be -1/-2 for Bb transposition, -2/-3 for A.

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