How to Make a Sound on the Clarinet

Your clarinet is assembled. Your reed is on. Now comes the moment of truth: actually making a sound.

Here's something I tell every new student: making a great sound on the clarinet is a skill, and it's a skill you can absolutely learn. But it starts with understanding what's actually happening when sound comes out of the instrument.

In this post, I'm going to walk you through what I call the How to Play Clarinet Triangle, which is my way of organizing the three most important elements of getting a great sound. Master these fundamentals, and you'll have a solid foundation that carries you for your entire clarinet journey.

1. The How to Play Clarinet Triangle

When it comes to making a sound on the clarinet, there are three things that matter most. I organize them into a triangle to show how they relate to each other and to make them easier to remember:

Air sits at the top of the triangle. It's the most important element by a wide margin.

Tongue position sits at the bottom right. The way your tongue is shaped directly affects the shape and direction of your air.

Embouchure sits at the bottom left. This is how you form your mouth around the mouthpiece.

All three of these work together. If one of them is off, it affects the others. But when you get all three working together, you get a clear, steady, resonant clarinet sound.

2. Air: The Most Important Element

The clarinet is a wind instrument. That means the air is actually the sound. When you blow into the mouthpiece, the reed vibrates against it, and that vibration resonates through the whole instrument to create the sound you hear. So the quality of your air directly determines the quality of your sound.

Not all air is equal. If you blow with big, puffed-out cheeks and wide, unfocused air, the sound is going to suffer. What we want is a focused, directed airstream.

The Straw Exercise

Here's an exercise I love for this. Grab a coffee stirrer, the really narrow kind, and blow through it. Listen to the little whistle you hear. That steady, focused, whistly sound is exactly what we want our air to feel and sound like when we play clarinet.

The goal is to be able to produce that same sound without the straw in your mouth. That's the target. Everything else we talk about in this section is in service of getting there.

3. Tongue Position and Air Direction

The shape of your tongue inside your mouth controls where your air goes and how focused it is. Here's how I think about getting the right tongue position:

Step One: The Back of the Tongue

Start by saying the letter E. Notice how the back of your tongue rises up. That's the starting position. The back of the tongue should be high.

Step Two: The Middle of the Tongue

From the E position, let the middle of your tongue come forward slightly, like you're starting to say an OO sound. So you go from E to a sort of EEE-OOO blend. This helps direct the air forward.

Step Three: The Tip of the Tongue

Finally, let the tip of your tongue angle slightly upward, getting it close to the roof of your mouth near the front. At the same time, squeeze in the corners of your mouth to form a nice, round circle.

Put those three things together and you'll start to produce that whistly straw sound. Everyone's mouth is a little different, so don't get too hung up on doing it exactly as I describe. What matters is matching that straw sound. Whatever your tongue has to do to get there, that's the right position for you.

One other thing: make sure your air is strong and steady. An unsteady airstream that fluctuates in and out will make your sound uneven. Think of blowing a continuous, steady stream, like you're maintaining that whistle nonstop.

4. Embouchure

Embouchure is a French word that just means how you put your mouth on the instrument. It sounds fancy but it's really about a few specific things.

The Straw Suction Exercise

Go back to that straw. This time, plug the end of it with your finger. Put your top teeth on the straw and try to suck through it like you're drinking through a straw that's blocked.

As you do that, notice what happens naturally. Your corners squeeze in. Your top lip comes down. Your chin flattens out and starts to point downward. That is almost exactly the embouchure shape we want for clarinet.

You can also try this with your finger as the straw substitute: put your finger in your mouth, press your top teeth gently on it, and suck. Same idea, same result.

What to Avoid

The thing to watch out for is biting down and squeezing your jaw closed. A lot of people do this instinctively when they're trying to drink through a straw, but it collapses the straw and cuts off the airflow. The same thing happens with a clarinet reed when you bite down too hard. Think of pushing the mouthpiece up into your top teeth rather than biting down onto it, and keep your jaw open with that chin pointing down.

Top Teeth on the Mouthpiece

When you play clarinet, your top teeth rest directly on the top of the mouthpiece, about a quarter inch or a centimeter from the tip. Your bottom lip curls over your bottom teeth slightly and rests against the reed. The corners of your mouth squeeze in to form that circle shape we practiced with the straw.

5. Making a Sound on the Mouthpiece and Barrel

Before putting the whole clarinet together, it's really helpful to practice making a sound on just the mouthpiece and barrel. This lets you focus entirely on your embouchure and air without worrying about fingers or keys.

Set your embouchure using the straw method. Then breathe in through the mouthpiece, which acts like a straw and helps set your embouchure in place. As you breathe out, keep that embouchure set and blow that focused, whistly air through the mouthpiece and barrel.

You're looking for a sound that is very steady from start to finish. If you have a tuner handy, the note you produce should be approximately a concert F# or the clarinet's G#. But the most important thing isn't the pitch. It's the steadiness. A clear, unwavering sound is the goal.

Experiment with how much mouthpiece is in your mouth. Too much and the sound gets honky or squawky. Too little and it sounds thin and constrained. Work your way from too little toward too much and find the sweet spot where the sound is fullest and steadiest.

6. Tonguing and Articulation

Once you have a steady sound, the next thing to understand is tonguing, which is how you create separate notes.

Your tongue has two jobs on the clarinet. The first is the position we already talked about, which shapes the air. The second is motion, specifically touching the tip of the tongue to the tip of the reed to interrupt the sound.

A lot of beginners are taught to say the syllable TU or TOO to tongue. The tongue motion in that is actually pretty close to correct. The problem is that the TU syllable also involves the air, and beginners end up pulsing the air with each tongue stroke rather than keeping it steady.

Instead, I want you to think of a continuous hum or sustained sound, and then just move the tip of your tongue between your lips in a T motion without changing anything about the air. The air stays constant. The tongue just briefly interrupts it. That's all tonguing is.

When you practice this with your straw, the whistle should stay steady the whole time while your tongue moves. If the whistle cuts out completely or sounds uneven between tongue strokes, your tongue is moving too far away from the reed and taking too much of your airstream with it.

7. The Sound Preparation Process

One of the most common beginner struggles is starting a note cleanly. You might get a little grunt or accent at the very beginning of a note before the real sound settles in. The sound preparation process fixes this.

Here's how it works:

First, breathe in through the corners of your mouth while keeping your embouchure mostly set.

Then set your embouchure and place the tip of your tongue against the tip of the reed.

Start blowing. Because your tongue is on the reed, no sound comes out yet. But your air is building up and getting into the right position.

Finally, lift your tongue off the reed. The sound starts immediately, cleanly, right from the beginning.

What this does is give your air a moment to get moving and get focused before any sound happens. By the time the tongue releases, the air is already in position and the note speaks immediately and clearly.

In real time, this whole process happens very quickly and flows together naturally. Think of it as one smooth motion: breathe, set, tongue on, blow, release. With a little practice it becomes second nature.

Once you can do this on the mouthpiece and barrel, you're ready to put the whole clarinet together and play your first actual notes.

This stuff is a lot easier to absorb when you can actually hear the sounds I'm describing and see the exercises in action. My "The Definitive How to Play Clarinet Guide for Beginners with Timestamps!" video covers all of this step by step with demonstrations you can pause and replay as many times as you need. Watch it now.

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