Is the Clarinet Easy to Play?

Over the many years I’ve been teaching clarinet lessons, I’ve heard a lot of questions. I don’t hear “is the clarinet hard?” too often, I think the fact that the clarinet has many parts, especially the reed + mouthpiece + ligature combo causes people to assume it is. But the clarinet isn’t easy nor is it hard, like all other instruments. The clarinet is good for breathing and for your lungs since you are using large volumes of air. You can play clarinet with asthma, in fact, it looks like playing a wind instrument will help improve lung capacity which will help improve asthma. Here is an article about a clarinet player who credits learning the instrument with an improvement in their asthma. There are other physical benefits of playing clarinet. Since you are sitting up straight when you play, you use your core muscles. The more you increase your lung capacity, the stronger your core muscles become. Playing the clarinet improves your hand-eye coordination, improves motor skills, requires dexterity of the fingers and coordination with the tongue, eyes, and breath. The clarinet requires some strength, and it will make you stronger.

Another part of learning to play the clarinet that is really important is equipment. It is really important to rent or buy a good quality instrument to start, and you should expect to pay over $200 if you are purchasing. Please do not purchase a clarinet from Amazon which has a low price tag as in $80, $100 even if it is listed with good reviews. Band instruments should be free blowing, and cheap poorly made instruments are often hard to blow through leading to frustration. The quality of the cheap instruments is poor and either they are out of adjustment or defective out of the case, and worse, if you take it to your music instrument repair shop it’s quite possible they will not work on it because the quality is too low.

I don’t want to list the names of the instruments to avoid, but for beginning clarinets, you get what you pay for oftentimes. Reliable clarinet brands include Yamaha, Buffet, Bundy, Selmer, Leblanc, Noblet, Artley. Clarinet mouthpieces also need to be of good quality and my favorite affordable mouthpiece is the Yamaha 4C. For reeds, it’s best to start on 2.5 strength either “blue box” Royal brand (NOT ORANGE), or Vandoren. I’ll write another post with more detail regarding getting off to a good start on the clarinet, but here is some basic info which should help answer the question: “is the clarinet hard or easy?”